Hey HN! Lev here, author of PgDog (https://github.com/pgdogdev/pgdog). I’m scaling our favorite database, PostgreSQL. PgDog is a new open source proxy, written in Rust, with first-class support for sharding — without changes to your app or needing database extensions.

Here’s a walkthrough of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6sebczWZ-c

Running Postgres at scale is hard. Eventually, one primary isn’t enough at which point you need to split it up. Since there is currently no good tooling out there to do this, teams end up breaking their apps apart instead.

If you’re familiar with PgCat, my previous project, PgDog is its spiritual successor but with a fresh codebase and new goals. If not, PgCat is a pooler for Postgres also written in Rust.

So, what’s changed and why a new project? Cross-shard queries are supported out of the box. The new architecture is more flexible, completely asynchronous and supports manipulating the Postgres protocol at any stage of query execution. (Oh, and you guessed it — I adopted a dog. Still a cat person though!)

Not everything is working yet, but simple aggregates like max(), min(), count(*) and sum() are in. More complex functions like percentiles and average will require a bit more work. Sorting (i.e. ORDER BY) works, as long as the values are part of the result set, e.g.:

     SELECT id, email FROM users
     WHERE admin = true
     ORDER BY 1 DESC;

PgDog buffers and sorts the rows in memory, before sending them to the client. Most of the time, the working set is small, so this is fine. For larger results, we need to build swap to disk, just like Postgres does, but for OLTP workloads, which PgDog is targeting, we want to keep things fast. Sorting currently works for bigint, integer, and text/varchar. It’s pretty straightforward to add all the other data types, I just need to find the time and make sure to handle binary encoding correctly.

All standard Postgres features work as normal for unsharded and direct-to-shard queries. As long as you include the sharding key (a column like customer_id, for example) in your query, you won’t notice a difference.

How does this compare to Citus? In case you’re not familiar, Citus is an open source extension for sharding Postgres. It runs inside a single Postgres node (a coordinator) and distributes queries between worker databases.

PgDog’s architecture is fundamentally different. It runs outside the DB: it’s a proxy, so you can deploy it anywhere, including managed Postgres like RDS, Cloud SQL and others where Citus isn’t available. It’s multi-threaded and asynchronous, so it can handle thousands, if not millions, of concurrent connections. Its focus is OLTP, not OLAP. Meanwhile, Citus is more mature and has good support for cross-shard queries and aggregates. It will take PgDog a while to catch up.

My Rust has improved since my last attempt at this and I learned how to use the bytes crate correctly. PgDog does almost zero memory allocations per request. That results in a 3-5% performance increase over PgCat and a much more consistent p95. If you’re obsessed with performance like me, you know that small percentage is nothing to sneeze at. Like before, multi-threaded Tokio-powered PgDog leaves the single-threaded PgBouncer in the dust (https://pgdog.dev/blog/pgbouncer-vs-pgdog).

Since we’re using pg_query (which itself bundles the Postgres parser), PgDog can understand all Postgres queries. This is important because we can not only correctly extract the WHERE clause and INSERT parameters for automatic routing, but also rewrite queries. This will be pretty useful when we’ll add support for more complex aggregates, like avg(), and cross-shard joins!

Read/write traffic split is supported out of the box, so you can put PgDog in front of the whole cluster and ditch the code annotations. It’s also a load balancer, so you can deploy it in front of multiple replicas to get 4 9’s of uptime.

One of the coolest features so far, in my opinion, is distributed COPY. This works by hacking the Postgres network protocol and sending individual rows to different shards (https://pgdog.dev/blog/hacking-postgres-wire-protocol). You can just use it without thinking about cluster topology, e.g.:

    COPY temperature_records (sensor_uuid, created_at, value)
    FROM STDIN CSV;

The sharding function is straight out of Postgres partitions and supports uuid v4 and bigint. Technically, it works with any data type, but I just haven’t added all the wrappers yet. Let me know if you need one.

What else? Since we have the Postgres parser handy, we can inspect, block and rewrite queries. One feature I was playing with is ensuring that the app is passing in the customer_id in all queries, to avoid data leaks between tenants. Brain dump of that in my blog here: https://pgdog.dev/blog/multi-tenant-pg-can-be-easy.

What’s on the roadmap: (re)sharding Postgres using logical replication, so we can scale DBs without taking downtime. There is a neat trick on how to quickly do this on copy-on-write filesystems (like EBS used by RDS, Google Cloud volumes, ZFS, etc.). I’ll publish a blog post on this soon. More at-scale features like blocking bad queries and just general “I wish my Postgres proxy could do this” stuff. Speaking of which, if you can think of any more features you’d want, get in touch. Your wishlist can become my roadmap.

PgDog is being built in the open. If you have thoughts or suggestions about this topic, I would love to hear them. Happy to listen to your battle stories with Postgres as well.

Happy hacking!

Lev

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