pgEdge Posts from Phillip Merrick https://www.pgedge.com/blog The latest pgEdge Posts from Phillip Merrick en-us pgEdge,PostgreSQL,PostgreSQL,Agentic AI <![CDATA[Building AI Agents on Postgres: Why We Built the pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/building-ai-agents-on-postgres-why-we-built-the-pgedge-agentic-ai-toolkit Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:57:01 GMT We are delighted today to be announcing the beta release of our pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit for Postgres.  We’ve had the benefit of collaborating on real-world Postgres-based AI applications the past two years with a number of leading customers, and this product announcement is the outgrowth of this learning.We listened to customers as they refined their AI strategies in response to the rapid evolution of LLMs, Agentic AI and integration technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and as we did so a few things stood out to us.First and foremost, many of the newly available tools and technologies are not suited to the needs of the enterprise, particularly in highly regulated industries or major government agencies.   Many of the new AI application builders and code generators – and the database platforms supporting them – do not adequately address enterprise requirements for high availability, data sovereignty, global deployment, security and compliance and the need in some cases to run on-premises or in self-managed cloud accounts.  As one CIO in financial services put it to us recently: “We’ve got a couple of dozen AI generated applications end users really want to put into production, but first we’ve got to figure out how to deploy them on our own internal compliant infrastructure.”Secondly, as compelling as it is to automate workflows with Agentic AI, or to generate new applications with tools like Claude Code, Cursor or Lovable, the biggest need is to work with existing databases and applications.  While newer Postgres-based cloud services work well with Agentic AI and AI app builders for brand new applications, they cannot accommodate existing databases and applications without a costly migration. And such a migration may well be to an environment that doesn’t meet the organization’s strict security and compliance requirements. Enterprise customers need AI tooling – including an MCP Server – that can operate against their existing databases.Additionally we saw there was no dedicated Postgres vendor offering a fully featured and fully supported MCP Server that works with all your existing Postgres databases.  Most of the available Postgres MCP Servers are tied to the vendor's own products, and in particular their cloud database offering.And thirdly, developing new AI applications – such as a chatbot running on top of an existing knowledge base – is overly complex with developers having to stitch together too many tools, APIs, Postgres extensions and data pipelines.  We saw an opportunity to make it easier to develop AI applications without having to undertake a major exercise in tool sourcing and integration.We are addressing each of these with the pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit for Postgres.  Together with pgEdge Enterprise Postgres or pgEdge Distributed Postgres it delivers on enterprise requirements such as high availability, data sovereignty and flexible deployment on-premises, in self managed cloud accounts or soon in our pgEdge Cloud managed cloud service.However, it is not tied to just our own Postgres offerings.   The pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit for Postgres, and in particular the included pgEdge Postgres MCP Server, work with any standard version of Postgres, including community Postgres and Amazon RDS.  This means you can download the toolkit from pgEdge, quickly configure Claude Code, or Cursor (and others) to use the pgEdge MCP Server (see here), and then in minutes be generating new UIs, applications and workflows running on top of your existing databases.  Or alternatively connect the pgEdge MCP Server to Claude Desktop, and use it to make recommendations for scaling and performance improvements. We could be biased, but we think this is a pretty big deal.  Key components of the pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit include:
  • The aforementioned pgEdge MCP Server, a highly performant and full featured MCP Server. It provides LLMs and agents with a secure connection to access Postgres databases and obtain detailed information about database structure and schemas, allowing them to reason about the data, schema, and performance metrics held within.
  • Natural Language Agents for querying data, available via a command line interface (CLI) or a web user interface. These are
  • full-featured MCP clients in Go, with Anthropic prompt caching (for a 90% cost reduction). The web client features a Modern React-based UI, demonstrating AI-powered chat for natural language database interaction.
  • pgEdge-vectorizer, a Postgres extension that automatically chunks text content and generates vector embeddings using background workers, providing a simple SQL interface for enabling vectorization on any table. Vector embeddings are automatically kept updated as the content changes.  pgEdge-vectorizer has no dependencies other than pgvector
  • and a connection to your LLM of choice.
  • pgEdge RAG Server, a dedicated API Server for
  • performing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) of text based on content from a PostgreSQL database using pgvector.
  • pgEdge-docloader, a utility that
  • makes it easy to bring initial material online and make it searchable by agents and can be used in conjunction with the pgEdge RAG Server and pgEdge Vectorizer. No external services or third-party pipelines are required beyond an embedding LLM provider.
  • VectorChord-bm25, a Postgres extension implementing BM25 ranked search for hybrid semantic and full-text searching. Also included are the pgvector, pg_tokenizer.rs and pg_vectorize extensions.
pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit for Postgres is fully open source, and available for free to all Postgres users. The pgEdge MCP Server works with Postgres versions from v14 on, other Toolkit components v16 on. pgEdge customers with paid subscriptions for pgEdge Enterprise Postgres or pgEdge Distributed Postgres receive support at no extra cost.  For self-hosted and self-managed deployment the product documentation and download can be found here. It will be available within the pgEdge Cloud managed service in Q1 2026.Today’s announcement is really just the beginning.   We look forward to seeing how developers use it to bring Agentic AI and AI generated apps to both new and existing databases while being able to deploy on enterprise grade infrastructure.  And we’d love to get your feedback!P.S. This blog post was entirely written by hand.  Any use of emdashes or bullet points is entirely my own doing. 

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/building-ai-agents-on-postgres-why-we-built-the-pgedge-agentic-ai-toolkit Phillip Merrick pgEdge,PostgreSQL,PostgreSQL,Agentic AI <![CDATA[Introducing The pgEdge Postgres MCP Server]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/introducing-the-pgedge-postgres-mcp-server Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:02:49 GMT Note: An update to the blog was released on 1/23. You can link to it here.One of the principal and most powerful components of the pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit is the pgEdge Postgres MCP Server. In just over a year MCP (Model Context Protocol), initially developed by Anthropic, has become the standard way to connect LLMs to external data sources and tools. Some people describe it as being like a USB for LLMs. The pgEdge Postgres MCP server makes it extremely easy to connect Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and other AI development tools directly to Postgres database – not just pgEdge distributions, but standard community Postgres, Amazon RDS, and pretty much any other relatively standard version of Postgres (so long as it is v14 or newer).Let’s walk through how to set up the pgEdge Postgres MCP Server, what makes it different, and how to use it with Claude Desktop and AI code generators like Claude Code and Cursor. Our discussion is somewhat Claude-centric, but the pgEdge MCP Server also works with OpenAI GPT-5 and local models such as Ollama.

What Makes Our MCP Server for Postgres Different

Perhaps your first reaction to seeing our announcement was “wait, what? Another Postgres MCP Server”.  But it turns out until today there was no dedicated Postgres vendor offering a fully featured and fully supported MCP Server that works with all your existing Postgres databases.  Most of the available Postgres MCP Servers are tied to the vendor's own products, and in particular their cloud database offering.The pgEdge MCP Server provides flexible deployment options: on-premises, in self managed cloud accounts or soon in our pgEdge Cloud managed cloud service. Additionally, when used with pgEdge Distributed Postgres, applications making use of the pgEdge MCP Server can meet enterprise requirements for high availability, multi-region failover and data sovereignty.  Most Postgres MCP servers out there give you basic read-only access—enough to query schemas and run SELECT statements. We built ours to be production-grade from day one: - The MCP server doesn't just list your tables. It pulls detailed information about your database structure: primary keys, foreign keys, indexes, column types, constraints, the works. This lets Claude actually reason about your data model instead of just blindly querying it. - Want to know which queries are slow? Which indexes aren't being used? The server exposes pg_stat_statements and other data so the LLM can help you optimize performance, not just write queries. - Connect to multiple Postgres instances from the same MCP server. Useful when you're working across dev, staging, and production, or when you need to query both your application database and your analytics warehouse. For Claude Code and Desktop you do this by configuring multiple MCP server instances with different names e.g. devdb, stagingdb, proddb. For your own MCP clients you can refer to the Natural Language Agent client code found in our MCP server repo.) - Many MCP Servers are stdio only, and do not support HTTP.   In addition to full HTTP support we’ve added TLS support, user and token auth, and read-only enforcement (at initial beta the MCP server is readonly, but this will be switchable in a forthcoming release).

Installation and Setup

The MCP server is part of the pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit, which you can download directly from our site. It works with Postgres 16, 17, and 18. For a quick start first go to https://github.com/pgEdge/pgedge-postgres-mcp/releases and download the correct MCP server download for your OS and architecture. Then follow the instructions below.# Check that the MCP server binary is ready to use

Connecting to Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop is probably the easiest way to get started with MCP servers. Here's the full setup:

Step 1: Locate Your Config File

The configuration file location depends on your OS:
  • :
  • :
  • :
If this file doesn't exist, create it.

Step 2: Add the pgEdge MCP Server

Edit and add this configuration:

Step 3: Restart Claude Desktop

After saving your config, fully quit and restart Claude Desktop. When you open a new conversation, you should see a small hammer icon () in the interface—that's your MCP server connection.

Step 4: Test It Out

Open a new conversation and try:Claude will use the MCP server to introspect your schema and list all tables with descriptions.Try something more advanced:Or get performance insights:

Connecting to Claude Code

Claude Code is where things get really interesting — you can have Claude write code that directly queries your database, with full context about your schema.

Step 1: Create Project Config

In your project root, create a file:

Step 2: Launch Claude Code

Claude Code will automatically detect the file and establish the MCP server connection.

Step 3: Start Building

Now you can give Claude commands like:Write a Python script that queries the top 10 users by sign-up date and exports them to CSV.Claude will:
  • Inspect your database schema via the MCP server
  • Understand the structure of your users table
  • Write properly parameterized SQL
  • Generate the complete Python script with error handling
Or try:I need a function that efficiently checks if a user has a certain permission. Look at my permissions model and write the most performant query.Claude will examine your foreign key relationships, check which indexes exist, and write optimized SQL based on your actual schema.

Using with Cursor

Cursor has excellent MCP support. Here's how to connect:

Step 1: Open Cursor Settings

  • Open Cursor
  • Go to
  • Under Installed MCP Servers select Add Custom MCP

Step 2: Add Server Configuration

Using the Cursor edit window, edit :

Step 3: Verify Connection

After saving, you should see a green "active" status indicator next to the pgedge-postgres server in the MCP section of Cursor settings.

Step 4: Use in Cursor Chat

Open the Cursor chat panel and reference your database:Or while writing code:I'm writing a migration script. Show me the current schema for the orders table so I know what columns already exist.

Advanced Configuration Options

Multiple Database Connections

You can configure multiple MCP servers in the same config file to work with different databases:Now Claude can query both databases and even help you write queries that join data across them.Now Claude can query both databases and even help you write queries that join data across them.

Read-Only Mode

[The initial beta01 version only supports readonly mode.  This is applicable for later versions.]For production databases, you probably want read-only access. Grant your database user only SELECT privileges:

Environment Variables and Security 

Rather than putting the database password directly in JSON files, we can use a .pgpass file for password managementThen configure without PGPASSWORD in the config:

What Claude Can Do With Your Database

Once connected, here are some real workflows you can enable:

Schema exploration and documentation

Generate markdown documentation for all tables in the public schema, including column descriptions and relationships

Query optimization

This query is running slow: [paste query]. Analyze the execution plan and suggest indexes or rewrites.

Migration assistance

I need to add a new column to track user subscription tiers. Look at my users table and write a safe migration script.

Data analysis

Find all users who signed up in the last month but haven't completed onboarding

Debugging

I'm getting a foreign key violation on the orders table. Show me all foreign keys and help me understand what's wrong.

Under the Hood: How It Works

The pgEdge MCP server implements the full Model Context Protocol specification. When the LLM wants to interact with your database, here's what happens:
  • : The LLM queries the MCP server for available tools and resources
  • : The MCP server queries Postgres system catalogs (
  • ) to build a complete picture of your schema
  • : When the LLM needs to run a query or get performance metrics, it calls the appropriate MCP tool
  • : Results are streamed back to the LLM in a structured format
  • : the LLM uses this information to inform its responses and code generation
The server maintains a connection pool to your database, so repeated queries don't create new connections each time.

Troubleshooting

"Connection refused" errors

Check that your database is accessible from wherever you're running Claude Desktop/Code. Try connecting with psql first:

MCP server not showing up in Claude Desktop

  • Verify the JSON syntax in your config file (use a JSON validator)
  • Check that the path to the MCP server binary is correct and executable
  • Look at Claude Desktop logs:

"Permission denied" on database queries

Make sure your database user has appropriate permissions. For read-only access, you need at minimum:

What's Next

We're actively developing additional features for the MCP server:
  • Support for write operations with appropriate safeguards, including a readonly by default switch
  • Improved optimization to save on token usage in database queries
  • Better optimization of schema discovery
  • Additional work on database performance monitoring
  • Further work on security, authorization and governance (dependent on feedback from users on requirements for real-world enterprise use cases)
The full pgEdge Agentic AI Toolkit (MCP server, vectorizer, RAG server, docloader) is available now in beta. Everything is open source under the Postgres license, and we're eager for feedback from the community.If you're building AI applications on Postgres and need your agents to have direct, intelligent access to your data, give the pgEdge Postgres MCP server a try. It's built to work with your existing infrastructure, whether you're on community Postgres or running our distributed platform.Download the toolkit – we can’t wait to see what you build with it – and send us your feedback!— Phillip Merrick
Chairman & Chief Product Officer, pgEdge

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/introducing-the-pgedge-postgres-mcp-server Phillip Merrick PostgreSQL,postgres,pgEdge <![CDATA[Introducing pgEdge Enterprise Postgres and full commitment to open source]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/introducing-pgedge-enterprise-postgres-and-full-commitment-to-open-source Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:04:04 GMT PostgreSQL is the fastest growing open source RDBMS according to DB-Engines and has won the hearts of developers three years running (StackOverflow’s Developer Survey 2023, 2024, 2025). Behind PostgreSQL is a vibrant community that has globally contributed to the project since 1994, causing its success as a truly adaptive database that can handle just about any use case and earning it the slogan, “Just Use Postgres!”Challenges such as guaranteeing high availability, simplifying day-to-day operations, preparing for scalable infrastructure, and serving the needs of usually globally distributed users aren’t new in the world of database administration. The challenge now has become how to obtain the benefits of a robust open-source platform backed by a thriving community, while still achieving the business needs of having a vendor who can provide certification and support that satisfies security, governance, and reliability requirements. That’s where pgEdge Enterprise Postgres, our newest release, provides the best of both worlds - the awesomeness of Postgres, backed by one of the most highly expert teams in the industry – providing a curated and dependable enterprise support experience modern businesses expect to deploy with confidence.We believe everyone should have access to software for highly available database deployments without high costs and without vendor lock-in. To that end, pgEdge is committed to furthering PostgreSQL’s ability to support highly available, distributed database infrastructure as a participant in the core PostgreSQL community. We are happy to announce that all distributed-ready components of pgEdge Enterprise Postgres and pgEdge Distributed Postgres are now 100% open-source under the permissive PostgreSQL Community License.

Enterprise-Grade Postgres, Out-of-the-Box

pgEdge Enterprise Postgres is an enterprise-grade PostgreSQL distribution that provides everything you need to run Postgres in production without piecing together disparate tools,  by curating essential tools and components into a single unified package. This ensures easy, consistent installation and employment of your database infrastructure along with everything you need to get up and running with a complete, enterprise-ready database environment.It’s designed to help enterprises:
  • Run mission-critical workloads with confidence.
  • Built-in
  • high availability
  • ensures uptime, while tested, enterprise-grade builds and security patches keep systems reliable and secure.
  • Adopt the latest PostgreSQL releases.
  • Support for
  • PostgreSQL v16 and v17
  • is included today, with
  • v18 support coming soon
  • , ensuring delivery of the latest  features and community enhancements.
  • Leverage enterprise-class extensions.
  • Out-of-the-box support for
  • pgAudit, pgBackrest, pgBouncer, PostGIS, pgVector
  • , and
  • more
  • means you have advanced monitoring, auditing, backup, pooling, and analytics capabilities built in.
  • Simplify management and monitoring.
  • Browser and desktop-based GUI management with
  • pgAdmin
  • makes administration straightforward, while curated defaults and performance tuning help teams accelerate deployments.
  • Prepare for distributed workloads.
  • pgEdge Enterprise Postgres is “distributed-ready” with built-in support for the
  • Spock multi-master logical replication extension
  • ,
  • Large Object Logical Replication (LOLOR)
  • , and
  • Snowflake Sequences
  • , making it simple to scale from single-node to distributed or multi-region deployments, at any time.
  • Near-zero downtime major version upgrades are possible out-of-the-box to help you meet high availability requirements, and
  • traditional instructions
  • for running zero-downtime upgrades fully apply.
  • Deploy anywhere.
  • Choose the model that fits your environment.
In short: pgEdge Enterprise Postgres gives you a faster path to secure, flexible and scalable Postgres, on your terms.

Improve Reliability and Scale of your Enterprise Applications

The real value of pgEdge Enterprise Postgres lies in its ability to help organizations grow without compromise.
  • Reduce risk
  • : Pre-tested builds and trusted PostgreSQL extensions lower operational complexity and help teams avoid costly downtime.
  • Improve agility
  • : Accelerate time-to-production by starting out with a single package that includes monitoring, advanced backup capabilities, support for high availability up to 99.999%, and more by default.
  • Scale seamlessly
  • : Start with a single instance, add replicas for high availability, and grow to globally distributed deployments, all without changing platforms.
  • Stay supported
  • :
  • Subscriptions
  • include
  • 24×7×365 global support
  • from seasoned Postgres experts with decades of experience and direct contributions to the PostgreSQL community, with optional
  • Forward Deployed Engineer services
  • for dedicated assistance.
For teams supporting business-critical workloads, pgEdge Enterprise Postgres delivers peace of mind, future-proof scalability, and freedom from vendor lock-in.

All pgEdge Components Are Now Fully Open Source

From this point forward, all pgEdge database server components are now fully open-sourced under the OSI-approved PostgreSQL License.This includes:
  • Spock
  • – multi-master logical replication, enabling true active-active deployments.
  • LOLOR
  • – Large Object Logical Replication for advanced replication scenarios.
  • Snowflake Sequences
  • – sequence support for distributed and high-scale applications.
These projects are now available under one of the most permissive open source licenses in the industry. The move ensures:
  • Transparency
  • : All source code is publicly available on GitHub.
  • Community alignment
  • : Contributions flow freely back to the PostgreSQL ecosystem.
  • Freedom of choice
  • : Organizations can deploy pgEdge technology without licensing restrictions or lock-in.

Get Started with pgEdge Enterprise Postgres

pgEdge Enterprise Postgres VM Edition is available immediately as part of a paid subscription, which includes tested builds, security updates released the same-day as the core PostgreSQL project, and 24x7x365 enterprise support. A pre-built, containerized version of pgEdge Enterprise Postgres, ideal for development, testing, and evaluation use is also available for download. pgEdge Enterprise Postgres - Container Edition with Kubernetes Operator support is targeted for release in Q4.   Learn more and try pgEdge Enterprise Postgres for free - www.pgedge.com/download Read the full Press Announcement

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/introducing-pgedge-enterprise-postgres-and-full-commitment-to-open-source Phillip Merrick PostgreSQL,pgEdge,Distributed Postgres,PostgreSQL High Availability,Distributed Postgres,PostgreSQL,PostgreSQL High Availability,postgres <![CDATA[PostgreSQL in Mission-Critical Environments Survey Results ]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/postgresql-in-mission-critical-environments-survey-results Thu, 10 Jul 2025 11:48:06 GMT An industry-wide survey conducted by Foundry (publishers of CIO, Information Week and other publications) reveals just how demanding enterprise availability requirements have become, and how dependent these IT leaders are on PostgreSQL for handling the workloads of modern applications. The research, spanning 212 IT decision-makers across enterprises with 500+ employees, conclusively showed 91% of organizations using PostgreSQL who participated in the survey require a minimum of 99.99% uptime—that's no more than 4 minutes of downtime per month. Even more striking, 24% of the total respondents can tolerate no more than 30 seconds of monthly downtime, indicating that PostgreSQL has firmly established itself as the backbone of mission-critical systems.The survey data paints a picture of an ecosystem in transition. With 37% of PostgreSQL deployments now supporting mission-critical applications and 30% standardized across most organizational workloads, the database has evolved far beyond its origins as an alternative to proprietary systems. This percentage is critical in revealing enterprise trust in Postgres as a reliable database management system, especially as when downtime occurs, the impact is severe—56% face delayed business operations, 49% experience support spikes, and 40% suffer brand trust damage.Even with strong dependence on highly available systems, nearly half (47%) have adopted multi-region deployments, but many still depend on cloud-native solutions that create vendor lock-in and may not provide the flexibility needed for true resilience. Despite this, a surprising 82% of organizations express concern about cloud region failures, and 21% have directly experienced cloud failures firsthand in the past year. The developer community's overall response is telling: 79% of organizations are either evaluating or considering distributed PostgreSQL solutions within the next 12 months. This represents a massive shift toward architectures that can deliver the extreme availability requirements modern applications demand, and showcases that Postgres is capable of delivering such a guarantee. Multi-master replication (MMR), also known as active-active replication, is generating particular interest among the 47% deploying across multiple cloud regions as it offers the promise of active-active configurations that can maintain operations and help organizations meet demanding availability requirements.For developers building the next generation of applications, these findings underscore the importance of thinking beyond traditional approaches to high availability and low latency. The era of accepting minutes of downtime for database maintenance or regional outages is rapidly ending, replaced by user expectations of always-on services. As PostgreSQL continues to prove its capability in mission-critical environments, the focus is shifting from whether it can handle enterprise workloads to choosing the best method for leveraging PostgreSQL while addressing the extreme availability that many modern businesses require.Ready to dive deeper into the survey findings and explore solutions for extreme PostgreSQL availability? Download the full report to access comprehensive insights, strategic recommendations, and detailed analysis of enterprise PostgreSQL deployment patterns.

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/postgresql-in-mission-critical-environments-survey-results Phillip Merrick pgEdge,PostgreSQL,Distributed Postgres,pgEdge,Distributed Postgres <![CDATA[pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL: The Next Generation — Introducing pgEdge Platform v24.7, Constellation Release]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/pgedge-distributed-postgresql-the-next-generation-introducing-pgedge-platform-v24-7-constellation-release Wed, 07 Aug 2024 11:00:00 GMT pgEdge has just released the latest version of its flagship product, pgEdge Platform v24.07, known as the Constellation Release. This update brings a host of new features designed to enhance the capabilities of distributed PostgreSQL databases. Building on its foundation as the only fully distributed PostgreSQL that is open (source code available) and based on standard PostgreSQL, pgEdge continues to lead the way in providing high availability and reduced latency across geographic regions. The Constellation Release introduces significant improvements, including advanced logical replication features, large object support, and enhanced error handling. These enhancements make pgEdge an even more powerful alternative for legacy multi-master replication technologies, offering greater throughput, flexibility, and control for users.

Key Enhancements in the Constellation Release

1. Large Object Logical Replication (LOLOR): With the new Large Object Logical Replication (LOLOR) feature, pgEdge ensures seamless integration for applications that store media assets and large files in PostgreSQL databases. This extension allows large objects to be compatible with logical replication, facilitating smoother transitions from legacy databases to PostgreSQL without requiring application modifications.  See blog for more details.2. Replication Exception Handling and Logging: The latest update includes an advanced error handling and logging mechanism. Replication errors are logged into a new exception table, preventing disruptions in replication processes. This enhancement ensures a robust user experience, offering greater visibility and control over replication errors and making troubleshooting more straightforward. 3. Replication Repair Mode: pgEdge now allows users to enable or disable "repair mode," providing the flexibility to manage replication processes without affecting the entire database cluster. This feature is particularly useful for controlling replication changes during error resolution or node-specific modifications.4. Automatic Replication of DDL Commands: Updating the database schema has never been easier. With the automatic replication of DDL commands, any changes made to a single node are propagated across all nodes in the cluster. This feature simplifies the management of distributed PostgreSQL applications, especially during active development or maintenance.  See blog for more details.5. Snowflake Sequence in Postgres Extension: To enhance sequence management in multi-master replication scenarios, pgEdge integrates Snowflake sequences within PostgreSQL. This extension ensures unique sequence numbers across different regions without needing application code or schema modifications, streamlining sequence management and improving scalability.  See blog for details and examples details.

Looking Ahead: High Performance Parallel Replication

pgEdge is set to introduce Parallel Replication in Q4 of this year. This feature will leverage multiple replication slots to enable parallel processing within distributed PostgreSQL clusters, significantly boosting replication throughput. It promises to reduce replication lag, ensuring timely data synchronization across nodes and maintaining data consistency even in high-demand environments.

Availability and Support

The pgEdge Platform is generally available as of July 31 and can be self-hosted on-premise or self-managed in the cloud with providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.   The new Constellation Release is available for download at https://www.pgedge.com/download/enterprise-postgres or can be accessed via GitHub.   pgEdge also offers enterprise-class support. Additionally, pgEdge Cloud, a fully managed service based on the pgEdge Platform, is available in beta and will be generally available in Q3.View the full press release here or visit www.pgedge.com for more information about pgEdge distributed PostgreSQL.

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/pgedge-distributed-postgresql-the-next-generation-introducing-pgedge-platform-v24-7-constellation-release Phillip Merrick PostgreSQL,Distributed Postgres,PostgreSQL <![CDATA[Considering Distributed Postgres: How to evaluate vendor claims of Postgres compatibility]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/considering-distributed-postgres-how-to-evaluate-vendor-claims-of-postgres-compatibility Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:29:53 GMT A number of distributed database vendors make claims about being “Postgres compatible” or “Postgres based”. This is no doubt a response to the growing and overwhelming popularity of Postgres with developers. When evaluating a distributed Postgres database system careful consideration should be given to the level of effort required to migrate application code.  Buyers should also look at the degree to which the product is outside the mainstream of the Postgres ecosystem, and the implications this raises.Here are some key questions and considerations:

1. Relationship with the PostgreSQL code base

In order to fully understand the basis of the vendor’s claims about Postgres begin by investigating the product’s exact relationship with the PostgreSQL code base. For open source products you can simply examine their source code in their Github repository. For a proprietary product ask the vendor to describe how their product is built on Postgres (or not), and how it delivers the claimed compatibility.Either way, the questions you need to ask here are:
  • Is the product’s core distributed functionality delivered by way of a standard extension (or extensions) to core Postgres itself?
  • Alternatively is the product a fork of the standard PostgreSQL code base, and how much does this deviate from it (a “hard fork”)?
  • Does the product require any patches to be applied to standard PostgreSQL? Is the source code for them available?
  • Does the product incorporate PostgreSQL code by way of a straight copy of code into the product’s own code base?   How recently has this been updated? i.e. what version of Postgres was utilized in this way?  Is it still supported by the Postgres community?
  • If the product is not making use of any Postgres code, how exactly is the claimed level of Postgres compatibility delivered?

2. Type of Postgres Compatibility

Claims of Postgres compatibility fall into the following three categories.
  • PostgreSQL has a well documented protocol for passing SQL commands and their results between the client and server. Certain distributed database products have adopted the Postgres wire protocol and this allows them to use the same language drivers as Postgres. 
  • This is the next level of Postgres compatibility.  Does the product accept all Postgres SQL commands, or at least a subset, and execute them with the same semantics as standard Postgres? 
  • Fully Postgres based products typically package standard Postgres along with the extensions and patches required for distributed operation. This will be fully evident in the product’s code base, assuming the source code is accessible. 

3. Support for new PostgreSQL versions

Determine how soon support for new Postgres major versions is incorporated into the product. This should be shortly after the annual Postgres major version release each September or October. Some distributed database products do not add support for new major versions of Postgres, locking the buyer out of the substantial innovation and improvements in each new Postgres major version release.

4. Support for PostgreSQL extensions

A major contributing factor to the success of Postgres is its extensible architecture and the thousands of extensions developed for it. Some of these extensions allow Postgres to function as an entirely different type of database: e.g. the PostGIS extension turns Postgres into a spatial database, and pgvector turns it into a vector database.The buyer should determine the level of support in the product – either none, limited or full – for Postgres extensions. Do extensions just work, as with standard Postgres, or do they require the vendor to do engineering to support the extension?

5. Implications of distributed Postgres database architecture on full Postgres compatibility

Constraints of distributed databases may place limits on the Postgres features and behaviors that can be supported by the products. Again, consult the vendor documentation for details on differences with standard Postgres.

6. Advantages of the Broad Postgres Community and Ecosystem

A vibrant developer community allows Postgres to continue to evolve and deliver a steady stream of innovation. Tapping into this community led development is one of the reasons organizations adopt Postgres.If a distributed database product is not Postgres based and therefore not a part of the Postgres mainstream, and instead is driven by a single company (even if it is open source), organizations buying the product will no longer be able to benefit from the innovations coming from the Postgres community.

7. Determine the level of effort required to migrate to the distributed Postgres product

Finally, and most importantly, you need to assess how much development work is required to migrate your applications to the product.  Run a pilot project that includes migration of all or part of a key application to run on at least two of the shortlisted products. Look at the level of effort required to migrate the code used in the pilot, and extrapolate to an overall level of migration effort.Using the above questions and considerations in your vendor assessment will guide you to the product that best fits your situation, depending on the importance of Distributed Postgres to you and your organization. You can also download the complete Distributed PostgreSQL Buyers guide.Learn more about pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL, which combines multi-master (active-active), multi-region and multi-cloud in a fully managed cloud service that is 100% standard Postgres and 100% open (source available).

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/considering-distributed-postgres-how-to-evaluate-vendor-claims-of-postgres-compatibility Phillip Merrick pgEdge <![CDATA[Announcing our partnership with Equinix, and availability of pgEdge Platform on Equinix Metal!]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/announcing-our-partnership-with-equinix-and-availability-of-pgedge-platform-on-equinix-metal Mon, 11 Dec 2023 21:30:02 GMT Today we are delighted to announce our new partnership with Equinix, the leading digital infrastructure and networking company. pgEdge is an Equinix Metal database partner, and is now featured in the Equinix solution showcase.We’ve been working closely with our friends at Equinix over the past months to deploy and optimize pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL on Equinix Metal bare metal infrastructure.  pgEdge Platform is now validated to run on Equinix Metal, and we’ve been using it ourselves for much of our high performance testing. We’ve been impressed with the raw performance numbers we’ve seen, and have found the Equinix Metal APIs to be easy and productive to work with.Many of the customers (or prospective customers) served by pgEdge and Equinix operate in mixed hybrid and multi-cloud environments across both public clouds and on-premises infrastructure.  The two most difficult aspects to manage across these environments are networking and databases, making this a compelling partnership for large enterprise customers and SaaS and Internet companies alike.The low latency and ultra high availability benefits of pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL are much enhanced when running on Equinix’s industry leading network infrastructure, reducing latency even further. In fact the lowest latency speeds we’ve seen between data centers on the east and west coasts of the US have been on the Equinix network.For organizations with applications that demand the highest levels of compute and network performance we heartily recommend running pgEdge on Equinix Metal and/or Equinix network infrastructure.  And for organizations looking to deploy cross-cloud or hybrid-cloud applications we can’t think of a better partnership to address the networking and data challenges these applications present.If you are interested in learning more about pgEdge and our new partnership with Equinix, please get in touch.  And you can always get started for free with pgEdge here.

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/announcing-our-partnership-with-equinix-and-availability-of-pgedge-platform-on-equinix-metal Phillip Merrick pgEdge,Distributed Postgres,PostgreSQL <![CDATA[Postgres is now the #1 database choice among developers]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/postgres-is-now-the-1-database-choice-among-developers Mon, 19 Jun 2023 19:15:00 GMT Like many in the Postgres world we were excited to see in the just released Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey that the Postgres database is now the most used across the 90,000+ developers surveyed.The Postgres database is used by 46% of all the survey respondents, edging out MySQL for the first time. This is up from 36% just three years ago. Moreover a whopping 43% of respondents who are not using Postgres expressed a desire to begin using it – far in excess of the “desired” numbers for any other database.It’s worth thinking about what has contributed to this growing popularity. Here at pgEdge we believe the flexibility provided by the Postgres extension model has a lot to do with it.  Popular extensions make it possible to use Postgres in domains where it might otherwise be less than suitable: for instance GIS (with PostGIS), or where a time series database is needed (TimescaleDB), or AI and ML (with pgvector and PostgresML).  We ourselves use the Postgres extension mechanism for Spock, which allows Postgres to operate in fully distributed multi-master clusters for low latency and high availability.The vibrant and extremely talented and committed developer community who keep advancing Postgres is also a major factor. The enterprise hardening and careful and methodical development of Postgres over the years have surely contributed to Postgres being suitable for a much wider variety of workloads than in years past.We also noted in the survey that for the first time edge platforms like Cloudflare, Vercel and Netlify were cited as cloud platforms in use by respondents, coming in at 15%, 11% and 9% respectively. As the vendor of one of the few distributed databases demonstrated to work with edge platforms like Cloudflare Workers we are excited to see their growing usage.  You can learn more about how to use pgEdge with platforms like Cloudflare workers here and here.We couldn’t be more thrilled to see this continued growth in Postgres usage alongside growing interest in these edge-oriented cloud platforms.  If you want to learn more about how we bring these worlds together, sign up here for a demo of pgEdge Cloud, or download pgEdge Platform.

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/postgres-is-now-the-1-database-choice-among-developers Phillip Merrick pgEdge <![CDATA[Why we started pgEdge (and why now)]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/why-we-started-pgedge-and-why-now Tue, 07 Mar 2023 04:02:56 GMT Even though we are just coming out of stealth, Denis and I are already being asked why we started pgEdge, and why now. 

Basically we started pgEdge for two reasons.  First off, application architectures are evolving to place more components at or near the edge of the network.  It began with static content at the presentation layer, and more recently companies like Cloudflare, Akamai and Fastly have opened their platforms to allow compute to happen at the edge in a serverless way.  The next logical step is for the database to be closer to the edge.   We think the best database to put at or near the edge is Postgres, the world’s most popular open source database.   And until now there has been no company doing distributed Postgres on top of the standard Postgres engine while also making their source code available.

Second, large enterprises are moving away from heavy and expensive proprietary databases like Oracle to open source databases, especially Postgres which has been proven in the enterprise space over the past 15 or more years.  However they need the same distributed capabilities Oracle provides, particularly for high availability architectures.  And having been trapped previously by a proprietary vendor they don’t want to invest again in proprietary solutions.  That is a need we wanted to meet with pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL, and why we are keeping it open and based on standard Postgres.Part of the pgEdge backstory is that all the way back in 2004 Denis and I met for breakfast at a Northern Virginia hotel, after having worked together earlier in our careers.   Denis wanted to discuss a terrific new startup business idea that involved bringing two sets of missing enterprise capabilities to open source Postgres: Oracle compatibility and fully distributed databases.  Keeping in mind what my mentors had drilled into me at webMethods, I said startups need to focus on one thing at a time, and maybe it was too early for fully distributed. And so we chose Oracle compatibility and, together with another friend (yo Astro!) we went “Long” on Postgres and co-founded EnterpriseDB, now one of the more successful independent companies in the Postgres community.

Fast forward to early summer 2022 and Denis and I got together again, this time at a wine bar on a pier over the Potomac River in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. We decided that with industry developments like the emergence of full-fledged edge computing platforms such as Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute@Edge and similar it was time to revisit “door #2”: fully distributed Postgres.  As luck (or providence) would have it, Denis and his team had been working on multi-active (multi-master) distributed Postgres – the Postgres extension we now call Spock – between Postgres consulting assignments for large financial institutions.  And so pgEdge was born!We are super excited about the technology we are bringing to market with pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL, the first edge database based on standard Postgres.  But we are equally excited about the wonderfully awesome team we get to work with – we’ve all worked together before in a variety of companies Denis and I have previously founded and/or run.   And most importantly we are so looking forward to making both our team and technology available to solve customers’ most pressing database challenges – reducing data latency and application page load times, reducing spend on proprietary database vendors, implementing high availability architectures and solving data residency challenges.  We’d love to discuss what we can do for your business, so please get in touch!Viva pgEdge!

]]> https://www.pgedge.com/blog/why-we-started-pgedge-and-why-now Phillip Merrick