The world of PostgreSQL wire compatibility

• mergestat-lite

  10 3,421 6.3 Go

  Query git repositories with SQL. Generate reports, perform status checks, analyze codebases. 🔍 📊

  

Thanks for this write up! I've been really interested in postgres compatibility in the context of a tool I maintain (https://github.com/mergestat/mergestat) that uses SQLite. I've been looking for a way to expose the SQLite capabilities over a more commonly used wire-protocol like postgres (or mysql) so that existing BI and visualization tools can access the data.

This project is an interesting one: https://github.com/dolthub/go-mysql-server that provides a MySQL interface (wire and SQL) to arbitrary "backends" implemented in go.

It's really interesting how compatibility with existing protocols has become an important feature of new databases - there's so much existing tooling that already speaks postgres (or mysql), being able to leverage that is a huge advantage IMO

• go-mysql-server

  23 2,202 9.9 Go

  A MySQL-compatible relational database with a storage agnostic query engine. Implemented in pure Go.

  

Thanks for this write up! I've been really interested in postgres compatibility in the context of a tool I maintain (https://github.com/mergestat/mergestat) that uses SQLite. I've been looking for a way to expose the SQLite capabilities over a more commonly used wire-protocol like postgres (or mysql) so that existing BI and visualization tools can access the data.

This project is an interesting one: https://github.com/dolthub/go-mysql-server that provides a MySQL interface (wire and SQL) to arbitrary "backends" implemented in go.

It's really interesting how compatibility with existing protocols has become an important feature of new databases - there's so much existing tooling that already speaks postgres (or mysql), being able to leverage that is a huge advantage IMO

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• sgr

  22 326 1.5 Python

  sgr (command line client for Splitgraph) and the splitgraph Python library

  

Shameless plug, but your list is missing Splitgraph [0] :)

We’ve been based on Postgres from the beginning, and although the backend is a bit more complex at this point, we’ve kept the wire protocol intact. We’re also heavily invested in FDWs, not only for federated queries (e.g. querying data at Snowflake – btw, you might enjoy our blog post on achieving a 100x speedup with aggregation pushdown), but also for queries on warehoused data stored as Splitgraph images. By keeping Postgres compatibility as our guiding constraint, we’ve been able to build a lot of functionality on top of just a few simple abstractions. The result is something akin to a magic Postgres database – you can connect dozens of live sources to it using FDW plugins, or you can ingest from hundreds data sources using Airbyte connectors, ultimately storing the data as immutable Splitgraph images in object storage.

As for the wire protocol, our implementation is heavily reliant on (a forked version of) PgBouncer. Basically, a query arrives, we parse it for references to tables (which look like Docker image tags), and the proxy layer performs whatever orchestration is necessary to satisfy the query. That could mean instantiating a foreign server to a saved connection, loading some data from object storage, or even lazily loading only the requisite data (we call this “layered querying” since it’s implemented similarly to AUFS). In the future, it could also mean delegating the query to a more specialized engine like Presto.

Point is, by keeping the frontend intact, we’re able to retain compatibility with all Postgres clients, but we’re free to implement the backend in more scalable or domain specific ways. For example, we’re able to horizontally scale our query capacity by simply adding more “cache nodes” that perform the layered querying.

We are definitely all-in on the Postgres wire protocol, and all the ecosystem compatibility that comes along with it. You can read our blog for more in depth discussions of this, but I don’t want to spam too many links here. :)

[0] https://www.splitgraph.com

[1] https://www.splitgraph.com/blog/postgresql-fdw-aggregation-p...

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