PgBouncer is useful, important, and fraught with peril

• asyncpg

  15 6,609 7.2 Python

  A fast PostgreSQL Database Client Library for Python/asyncio.

  

what a great post, we have had a ton of issues with users using pgbouncer and it's not because things are "broken" per se, it's just the situation is very complicated, and pgbouncer's docs are also IMO in need of updating to be more detailed and in a few critical cases less misleading, specifically the prepared statements docs.

This blog post refers to this misleading nature at https://jpcamara.com/2023/04/12/pgbouncer-is-useful.html#pre... .

> PgBouncer says it doesn’t support prepared statements in either PREPARE or protocol-level format. What it actually doesn’t support are named prepared statements in any form.

That's also not really accurate. You can use a named prepared statement just fine in transaction mode. start a transaction (so you aren't in autocommit), use a named statement, works fine. you just can't use it again in another transaction, because it will be "gone" (more accurately, "unmoored" - might be in your session, might be in someone else's session). Making things worse, when the prepared statement is "unmoored", its name can then conflict with another client attempting to use the same name.

so to use named prepared statements, you can less ideally name them with random strings to avoid conflicts, or you can DEALLOCATE the prepared statement(s) you used at the end of your transaction. for our users that use asyncpg, we have them use a uuid for prepared statements to avoid these name conflicts (asyncpg added this feature for us here: https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg/issues/837). however, they can just as well use DEALLOCATE ALL, set this as their `server_reset_query`, and then so that happens in transaction mode, also set `server_reset_query_always`, so that it's called at the end of transactions. Where pgbouncer here IMO entirely misleadingly documents this as "This setting is for working around broken setups that run applications that use session features over a transaction-pooled PgBouncer." - which is why nobody uses it, because pgbouncer claims this is "broken". It's not any more broken than it is to switch out the PostgreSQL session underneath a connection that uses multiple transactions. Pgbouncer can do better here and make this clearer and more accommodating of real world database drivers.

• pgbouncer

  34 2,648 8.7 C

  lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL

  

Pgbouncer maintainer here. Overall I think this is a great description of the tradeoffs that PgBouncer brings and how to work around/manage them. I'm actively working on fixing quite a few of the issues in this blog though

1. Named protocol-level prepared statements in transaction mode has a PR that's pretty close to being merged: https://github.com/pgbouncer/pgbouncer/pull/845

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

Suggest a related project