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PgDog, an open-source proxy designed to make Postgres horizontally scalable, has secured funding and is now available for deployment. It aims to address Postgres’s scaling limitations, with production use exceeding 2 million queries per second.
PgDog, an open-source proxy that enhances Postgres scalability, has secured funding and is now available for deployment across cloud, on-premises, and other environments, marking a significant step toward making Postgres suitable for massive-scale applications.
According to a post on Hacker News, PgDog is a new project designed to enable horizontal scaling of Postgres databases through a proxy layer. The project has raised $5.5 million from investors including Basis Set, YC, and Pioneer Fund. It is currently in production use, with over 2 million queries per second handled across dozens of deployments, including sharding over 20 TB of data.
PgDog is open source, with over 1.4 million Docker pulls on GitHub, and releases occur weekly. The developers, a small team of three infrastructure and application engineers, have extensive experience scaling Postgres at companies like Instacart. They emphasize that PgDog is a dedicated solution for scaling Postgres, not a pivot or secondary project, and it can be deployed anywhere—cloud, on-prem, or locally—using Docker images and simple configuration changes.
Implications for Database Scalability at Scale
The funding and availability of PgDog could significantly impact how organizations deploy and scale Postgres, potentially reducing reliance on more complex or expensive database solutions. Its open-source nature and ease of deployment make it accessible to a broad user base, from startups to large enterprises, aiming to handle workloads previously limited by Postgres’s scaling challenges.
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Postgres Scaling Challenges and Recent Innovations
Postgres has traditionally been limited in scalability, prompting the development of solutions like MongoDB, DynamoDB, and others. However, these alternatives often introduce complexity or cost. The recent focus on scaling Postgres directly, through projects like PgDog, reflects a broader industry trend to enhance the capabilities of this popular relational database. The team behind PgDog previously worked on scaling Postgres at Instacart, where they managed to serve hundreds of thousands of orders per minute by sharding and optimizing deployments.
“PgDog is serving more than 2 million queries per second, in production, across dozens of deployments.”
— an anonymous researcher on Hacker News
Postgres horizontal scaling tools
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Unanswered Questions About PgDog’s Adoption and Support
Details about the enterprise edition, including SLA-backed support and specific performance benchmarks, remain limited. It is also unclear how the project will evolve to address large-scale enterprise needs or how quickly it will gain broader adoption outside early deployments.
database sharding solutions for Postgres
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Next Steps for Adoption and Enterprise Features
The team plans to release an enterprise edition with SLA-backed support, targeting larger organizations and cloud providers. Further updates on performance benchmarks, user adoption, and community engagement are expected in the coming months, alongside continued weekly releases of the open-source version.
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Key Questions
What is PgDog and how does it work?
PgDog is an open-source proxy that enables horizontal scaling of Postgres databases by distributing queries across multiple nodes, making large-scale deployments more feasible without changing the core database.
Who developed PgDog and what is their experience?
The project was developed by a small team of infrastructure engineers with extensive experience scaling Postgres at companies like Instacart, focusing solely on making Postgres scalable at any size.
Is PgDog suitable for enterprise use?
An enterprise edition is planned, which will include SLA-backed support, but details on enterprise features and support levels are still forthcoming.
How can I deploy PgDog?
Deployment is straightforward: pull the Docker image, update your DATABASE_URL, and start using PgDog in your environment—cloud, on-prem, or local.
What are the future developments for PgDog?
The team will release an enterprise version, continue weekly updates, and expand support and features to facilitate broader adoption at larger scales.
Source: Hacker News
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