pgEdge announced the general availability of pgEdge Platform, the first fully open and fully distributed PostgreSQL database designed to run at or near the network edge and between cloud regions. With this milestone release – and after a seven month beta period – pgEdge will now provide support for customers moving applications deployed on pgEdge Platform into production.  In this blog, we will review the new features it brings to the table and benefits of its multi-master capabilities.

The general availability (GA) of pgEdge provides support to the latest PostgreSQL version 16, as well as v15,  and brings together the strengths of PostgreSQL and pgEdge to harness the power of edge computing.

Key Enhancements in the General Availability

The feedback we received during the beta period has played a pivotal role in enhancing the pgEdge Platform, resulting in these key technical enhancements:

  • pgEdge Anti-Chaos Engine (ACE): ACE is designed to ensure consistency between database nodes within a pgEdge distributed cluster. ACE facilitates background and on-demand comparisons of tables between nodes, employing Merkel trees for efficient comparison of tables containing hundreds of millions of rows. This technology offers unparalleled data consistency, especially when operating in dynamic edge environments.

  • Ultra high availability support: Recognizing the critical importance of high availability in modern data architecture, the pgEdge Platform now incorporates support for synchronous read replicas within regions. This feature, implemented via Patroni and etcd, complements the inherent cross-region failover and resiliency features of the pgEdge multi-master architecture. The result is maximum availability, ensuring your applications remain online and responsive.

  • Support for pgCat: Connection pooling is a vital aspect of efficient database management. The pgEdge Platform now offers support for pgCat, a robust connection pooling solution. This enhancement streamlines database connections, optimizing performance for applications with high concurrency demands.

  • Support for pgvector and other Postgres extensions: Machine learning applications often require specialized extensions to PostgreSQL. The pgEdge Platform now provides validated support for pgvector, a popular PostgreSQL extension for vector embeddings. This addition enhances the platform's capability to cater to diverse, data-intensive applications. It's worth noting that the pgEdge Platform also supports over 20 other commonly used PostgreSQL extensions, including pgBackrest, PostGIS, PLpgSQL, PL/Profiler, and pgBouncer. 

  • Multi-master (active-active) logical replication with conflict resolution: pgEdge Platform Spock 3.1 extension allows for simultaneous read and write operations on multiple distributed nodes, creating an active-active database environment. This enables real-time data synchronization across distributed edge nodes. It ensures that data changes are instantly propagated, making up-to-the-minute insights and actions possible. It also ensures high availability and zero downtime for maintenance by eliminating single points of failure. Even if one node goes down, others continue to operate seamlessly. 

Conclusion

For application developers and database architects looking to deploy low latency and/or high availability applications that need to be globally distributed, pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL is a multi-master (active-active) distributed database system. Presentation, application logic and the world’s most popular open source relational database can all be deployed at or close to the network edge or between cloud regions. This provides reduced data latency, better customer experiences, ultra high availability, and a way to address data residency requirements without application code changes.

pgEdge Platform packages pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL as downloadable software that can be self-hosted and self-managed in either on-premises environments and/or in the cloud with major providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.  For more information and resources, or to download pgEdge Platform, visit https://www.pgedge.com/download.