PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you

I us pg. not that I know much about database internals, besides the 'b-tree' stuff we learned in college.

I don't know how the pg scaling story gets fixed unless certain things are rewritten. that's my fear of going all in pg.

mysql has vitess etc & even upgrades are easier. though pg is more extensible.

> The reason DBs like Mongo or Dynamo exist is because Postgres has a scaling problem.

I've used Postgres at a few places and the #1 problem was always high availability, not scaling. One Postgres cluster could easily handle 100000 transactions per minute, but when a primary node went down it was a page and manually failing over to the spare then manually replacing the spare. The manual tooling was very finicky but at least it worked, no automated solution came even close. Lack of a good HA story is why I avoid self-managed Postgres as much as possible.

"Why Us" => "I ran Postgres at Instacart, where we scaled the company 5x in April of 2020. The biggest problem we had was making Postgres serve 100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute"

Couldn't be a better why us :)

> The reason DBs like Mongo or Dynamo exist is because

Not quite. The reason "DBs" like those exist is purely due to fashion. Lets not kid ourselves into thinking they do anything better, save the exception of making data hard to access, which might be a project goal in some cases.

I am trying to gain a basic understanding of this: Right now I have a 4TB DB on one large box. Is the idea that using a proxy tool like PGDog I could spin up 8 smaller boxes handling ~500GB each and then one medium box for the proxy?

Right now I have a project that has very heavy write traffic from multiple services and a web app that reads from this. We are starting to hit the point where no amount of indexing, query optimisation, caching or box upgrades is helping us. We are looking at maybe moving the bulk of the static data to clickhouse to reduce the DB size but I would love to hear if PgDog or other kind of sharding could be useful for this use case.

I'm curious how this might help with our biggest downtime-causer with postgres, which is major version upgrades. Poolers do a great job for failover and load balancing, but we consistently need ~10-20 minutes of downtime once or twice a year to do upgrades. Logical replication between old->new versions could probably help, but it would still require flipping everything over to the new cluster without partial writes or anything silly. Anybody have experience with this?

PgDog, Neki, multigres, awesome to see. And yes this is the main issue with postgres. Well this and not having index hints, looking forward to 19

Is there an explainer for people who are broadly familiar with the DB space? It sounds like you're building an equivalent to Vitesse for Postgres, but it's not super clear from the article (which I know is not the point of this, but still :) ).

Edit: It also might be interesting to point out how your solution differs from what the folks at Planetscale are building https://planetscale.com/neki

I notice there is an Enterprise Edition, can you please specify which features are not open source? Do you predict new features you add will be ee licensed as a way to pay back your VC funders?

  We sharded over 20 TB that we know about.

This is probably a typo, right? 20TB isn't that big. I would imagine they've sharded a lot more than that

> With $5.5M from Basis Set, YC, Pioneer Fund and other great investors, we have years of runway,

This is years of product development with a three person team. If Enterprise sales and support are a big part of your business plan it will suck up a lot more than that.

I tried out PgDog a while ago, but couldn't find a good way of handling the config except for having this users / pgdog toml file, which makes it a bit awkward to handle in kubernetes where we often do multi-tenancy in postgres - or rather having many databases on the same instance(s), and have them come and go at will.

Also had an issue with it because it cached authentication requests when doing passthrough it seems, I'd changed the roles password, but it kept using the old one, which was no bueno ;).

PgDog seems to make more sense when you really care about a few databases that need massive scale, rather than a simple proxy in front of postgres. I'll keep following the development though, it is much needed in this space, postgres can use all the investment it can get to get it past the single machine scale that it excels at currently.

Three real-world issues I've run into recently with PgBouncer + Postgres are:

1. pool exhaustion from idle connections inside open long-running transactions

2. SQLAlchemy's client-side pool using dead connections that PgBouncer had already killed, causing periodic request errors

3. Some tasks have to bypass PgBouncer when they use SET or prepared statements

I've already sharded large datasets at the application layer, but looks like PgDog solves the above problems for any future work?

I've seen a couple of these "distributed" postgres extensions.

My question is, has any of them been talked about being upstreamed to postgres itself? Or, adding a custom built in feature to postgres itself?

I do tenant per PG schema, most are smallish some are bigger (not much, can do all in a single box) but moving forward eventually will need something like this. Also plan to provide "get your own VPS" for more enterprise customers.

This kind of tool will help in this case?

How is this different from Citus?

Good stuff, although I’m not quite sure about the fast OLAP use case.

If you’re already sharding by tenant for other reasons, OK… But I see CDC to a true OLAP system as more scalable.

PostgreSQL still needs real columnar tables in the core, hopefully one day

>PgDog is a sharder, connection pooler and load balancer for PostgreSQL. Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, reliable and scales databases horizontally without requiring changes to application code.

Still trying to figure out how this works technically, is the performance gain really just re-write in rust?

I'm a big PGDog fan! It really helped us scale our connection proxy needs pretty substantially and it has great features like auto mode to support Aurora failovers neatly. It's infra that just works.

I've loved using pgdog for the last 6 months. It's been incredibly stable. It's nifty how they've solved the LISTEN/NOTIFY on a transaction pooler problem.

I've moved from pgbouncer to pgdog a few months ago without issue. Huge fan.

It’s surprising they don’t mention advantages over other sharding systems like Citus. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s only a proxy and not core extensions? But that could limit capabilities.

I wish them all the best. Supabase, Timescale, etc etc. there's a whole cottage industry of extending postgres to whatever you need.

Suggestion: have more than just helm and Docker in your quickstart documentation. I'd like to try this out just to see what it can do, but not quite enough to fire up one of those systems for it.

Is there a binary I can run directly?

Does making it "just work" here come with any caveats vs standard PG?

the reason mongo is a joy to use in scaled env is because no additional setup/software needed and all drivers natively support secondary/primary writes/reads and topological changes. so it's end to end, and adding is as a new proxy in frontend of postgres leads to all clients being incompatible or the code itself has no control anymore about when to use a secondary and what allowed stall is acceptable for a particular query. Any solutions to this by pgdog?

Nit-Pick: It might be anti-marketing, still it would be helpful if the use cases can be articulated in a way where it would make sense to use this Vs any other type of database. Honesty goes a long way with the more technical folks for anything related to infrastructure.

Surfacing where and how PG is better than Dynamo or any other database is probably a good starting point instead of calling out PG a silver bullet for everything. At the end of the day its all a trade-off.

2M qps in production is legit. Curious how much RAM and CPU that takes on average per deployment though

I hope people pronounce this as „pig-dog” and has a mascot that looks like „man-bear-pig”

i am not using any tool like pgbouncer and have not run into any issues so far. Is it even required these days? Have you guys tested your setup without these connection poolers/multiplexers?

How are 3 developers going to QA this properly ?

how does it compare to PlanetScale ?

we are using PG bouncer in production. Interesting, I will follow the evolution of this project

This commit looks... odd.

https://github.com/pgdogdev/pgdog/commit/36434f93f03dec1d7d4...

I want to have as much fun as the next developer, but that makes me worry, what with supply chain attacks in the news and all.

Cool work, thanks.

Wrt. the pooler, how do you compare with pgbouncer?

I'm interested because I have a postgres instance, low-traffic but still like ... tens of r(eads)ps. I was not running anything close to the machine limits but still added pgbouncer to improve performance and didn't see a noticeable difference. I was stress-testing the machine obv., I'm not talking about the 10 rps, lol.

For context, my numbers were something like 10k rps +/- 1k vanilla postgres and like 9k rps +/- 1k with pgbouncer in front of it. So ... slightly slower but big error bars so I wouldn't say for sure. I ended up not using pgbouncer as the benefit was immaterial.

Also yeah, in case you want to check it out, it's the db that backs this project: https://httpstate.com.