Frequently Asked Questions

pgEdge is used by an array of SaaS, AI, financial services and technology companies, along with multiple government agencies in the US Government and Europe.

Spock is a pgEdge-developed PostgreSQL extension that supports asynchronous multi-master (active-active) logical replication, making it possible for pgEdge Distributed Postgres to be fully distributed with reads and writes taking place at any node. It is installed by default as part of pgEdge Enterprise Postgres, so that your installation is Distributed-Ready, providing an easy upgrade path to pgEdge Distributed Postgres.

Yes. Spock is a fully open source project under the PostgreSQL License. The source code is publicly available on GitHub, with no restrictions beyond those of the standard PostgreSQL community license.

Yes. pgEdge has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification across all of its products, including pgEdge Distributed Postgres and pgEdge Enterprise Postgres. This certification confirms that our security, availability, and operational processes meet rigorous industry standards, and reflects our commitment to protecting customer data and maintaining trust across all deployment models.

Yes. All pgEdge products and components, including pgEdge Distributed Postgres, pgEdge Enterprise, and supporting extensions such as Spock, are delivered with SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials). These SBOMs provide transparency into the open source and third-party components included in each release, supporting compliance, security auditing, and supply chain risk management.

pgEdge is built 100% on standard PostgreSQL, with a minimal set of targeted patches to enable advanced replication capabilities required by pgEdge Distributed Postgres, such as support for conflict-free delta apply columns in Spock.

These patches are fully open source and licensed under the standard PostgreSQL license. They are included by default in pgEdge Enterprise, making it “Distributed-Ready” and providing a seamless upgrade path to pgEdge Distributed when you’re ready to enable write-anywhere, multi-region replication.

For pgEdge Enterprise Postgres (single-cluster, self-hosted), we currently support PostgreSQL versions 16 and 17.

For pgEdge Distributed Postgres, we currently support PostgreSQL v15, v16, and v17.

For pgEdge Enterprise Postgres, no changes are required. It is a drop-in replacement for standard PostgreSQL and is fully compatible with your existing applications and database schemas.

For pgEdge Distributed Postgres, most applications work with little or no modification, especially when the schema design avoids write conflicts. Our experience across a wide range of PostgreSQL workloads shows that many real-world applications are naturally “conflict free.”

However, distributed replication does require a few key schema considerations:

• All replicated tables must have a primary key. Logical replication depends on primary keys to identify and synchronize changes across nodes.

• Standard PostgreSQL sequences do not work correctly in a distributed, multi-master environment, as they are not replicated and can lead to ID collisions. To solve this, pgEdge includes a built-in Snowflake Sequences extension, which fully replaces the standard SEQUENCE mechanism.  The pgEdge Snowflake extension generates globally unique, time-sortable 64-bit integer IDs using the widely adopted Snowflake ID algorithm. Each ID encodes a timestamp (epoch), node ID, and sequence counter into a single packed BIGINT. It includes drop-in replacements for nextval() and currval(), as well as helper functions to extract the embedded metadata (timestamp, node ID, and local sequence value) from each generated ID. This solution makes it easy to use surrogate keys in distributed schemas without needing UUIDs or custom logic, and without sacrificing performance or sortability.

If any schema or application changes are needed to optimize for distribution, our team is available to assist. These changes are typically minimal and straightforward.

All publicly available pgEdge-developed source code is now fully open source and licensed under the standard PostgreSQL License. This includes Spock, our advanced logical replication extension. We’ve adopted the same permissive license used by PostgreSQL itself to encourage openness, transparency, and community collaboration.

pgEdge includes a minimal set of patches to the PostgreSQL core to support advanced conflict-avoidance and delta-apply functionality in Spock. This patch is also licensed under the PostgreSQL License and has been submitted to the community for potential inclusion in future versions of PostgreSQL.

Both pgEdge Enterprise Postgres and pgEdge Distributed Postgres are fully open source. All pgEdge-developed runtime components, including Spock and the necessary PostgreSQL patches, are licensed under the standard PostgreSQL License and available on GitHub. Anyone is free to use, modify, and deploy them independently at no cost.

We charge for production usage when customers choose to rely on our commercial offering, which delivers significant additional value beyond the open source components. This includes:

• Pre-built and tested binaries for supported environments

• System-level packaging, configuration, and deployment tooling

• Access to production-grade support and SLAs

• Timely delivery of bug fixes and security patches

• Early access to new features and improvements

This commercial model allows us to fund ongoing development while giving users the flexibility to choose between self-managing the open source components or relying on our supported distribution for production needs.

pgEdge Cloud Edition is competitively priced with other managed PostgreSQL DBaaS offerings, while delivering the added benefits of distributed, multi-region, active-active deployment.

You can try pgEdge Cloud Edition for free using our Developer Edition, which allows you to explore its capabilities in a non-production environment. When you’re ready for production use, paid subscription plans include support, SLAs, and advanced management features.

For pricing details or to request a customized quote, please contact us at sales@pgedge.com.

pgEdge Enterprise Postgres is a hardened, enterprise-grade distribution of PostgreSQL, built and packaged by pgEdge. It includes performance, manageability, and replication enhancements, enterprise-ready extensions, and an easy upgrade path to pgEdge’s distributed write-anywhere architecture.

pgEdge Enterprise Postgres is a self-hosted, single-cluster PostgreSQL distribution designed for organizations that want enterprise-class PostgreSQL with commercial support, advanced extensions, and full compatibility—without the complexity of a distributed architecture.

In contrast, pgEdge Distributed Postgres is a fully distributed, multi-master PostgreSQL product with built-in multi-master replication, high availability, and support for active-active deployments across regions.

pgEdge Enterprise Postgres includes everything needed to run PostgreSQL in production and is “Distributed-Ready” - you can enable Spock at any time to upgrade to a fully distributed setup with no need to reinstall or reconfigure your database foundation.

The package includes PostgreSQL 16 & 17 with pgEdge patches, plus key enterprise extensions such as Spock, pgAudit, pgBackRest, pgBouncer, PostGIS, pgVector, LOLOR, and the Snowflake sequence extension. All packages are built, tested, and provided via a secure repository for RHEL, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and soon Debian and Ubuntu.

No. Spock is included but disabled by default in the Enterprise package. Customers can enable it later to add multi-master, write-anywhere capabilities without changing their database distribution.

Initial release supports RHEL 9 & 10, Rocky Linux 9 & 10, and compatible distributions on x86_64 and aarch64 (ARM) architectures. Debian and Ubuntu package support will be following shortly in a future release.

A pgEdge Enterprise Postgres subscription includes 24x7x365 support from our PostgreSQL experts, with defined SLAs for issue response and resolution. Optional dedicated Forward Deployed Engineer services are also available.

The Enterprise Postgres packages are available and supported as part of a paid subscription. This includes the software, tested builds, security updates, and support. Many included extensions are open source, but the bundled build and packaging are pgEdge-maintained.

Yes. Our packages are designed to be drop-in replacements for community PostgreSQL. Migration is supported from previous community versions with standard PostgreSQL upgrade methods. Migration assistance is available as part of the Support Subscription.

Yes! We have designed pgEdge Distributed Postgres to support placement of nodes across global networks. In particular you can have pgEdge nodes running in geographically disparate cloud regions across your cloud provider’s network.

pgEdge is a multi-master distributed database system built on standard PostgreSQL and designed for low latency, high availability and seamless failovers. It relies on Postgres to guarantee ACID properties at the node level to clients. In a distributed cluster — that may span multiple cloud regions or datacenters — pgEdge offers eventual consistency between nodes using a configurable policy (e.g. last-writer-wins) for conflict resolution, along with conflict-free delta apply columns (i.e. CRDTs) for running sum fields. This allows for independent, concurrent and eventually consistent updates across multiple nodes.

When workloads are partitioned optimally, customers using pgEdge can enjoy low latency and high availability without compromising the practical consistency needs of their applications. According to the PACELC theorem, which expands on the CAP theorem, distributed systems must make trade-offs not only if there is a Partition (P), choosing between Availability (A) and Consistency (C), but also else (E), during normal operation, between Latency (L) and Consistency (C).

pgEdge is designed to prioritize availability and low latency, making it well suited for geo-distributed deployments that require responsiveness and regional fault tolerance. While this approach favors eventual consistency during partitions and emphasizes fast response times during normal conditions, pgEdge includes conflict-resolution and delta-apply mechanisms to preserve logical correctness. Our support team can assist in optimizing your workload and schema design to meet the specific availability, latency, and consistency needs of your application.

Yes. You can configure synchronous read-only nodes in availability zones within the same region for local within-region failover.

Yes! Please see the following resources:

• Blog post to see how to use pgEdge with platforms like Cloudflare Workers.

• Video and download of using pgEdge Distributed Postgres with Akamai Cloud.

For pgEdge Distributed Postgres: VM Edition and pgEdge Distributed Postgres: Cloud Edition, to achieve the maximum latency benefit you will want to replicate your application logic so it is resident in each of the same cloud regions or data centers where you are placing pgEdge database nodes. Use automation to ensure your application code stack and infrastructure are configured identically in each region. Tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation for infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines for code deployments are highly recommended. pgEdge Distributed Postgres: Cloud Edition ensures the database infrastructure and software are deployed securely and identically across your chosen regions. If you are using an edge platform such as Cloudflare Workers, your application logic is already available across the edge network you are utilizing.

Standard logical replication by itself does not correctly handle “running sum” columns for items such as inventory and account balances.  pgEdge Distributed Postgres supports conflict-free delta apply columns that use a delta application technique to ensure that for a potentially conflicting transaction the deltas at each node are captured and replicated to ensure a correct end result. This delivers the same behavior as Conflict-free Replication Data Types (CRDTs) for running sum columns in certain other distributed database systems. This simpler approach for a common use case reduces programming complexities associated with CRDTs. More advanced capabilities for implementing other Conflict-free Replication Data Types will be available via user-defined functions in a future release; please contact pgEdge support for more information.

Yes. pgEdge Distributed Postgres is available as a free download at https://www.pgedge.com/download. It can be used at no cost for development, testing, and evaluation purposes.

For production deployments, we offer commercial subscriptions that include enterprise support, certified builds, security updates, and access to new features. This ensures a stable and secure experience when running pgEdge in mission-critical environments.

We currently support up to 7 database nodes in a cluster. However for many applications we are finding just three database nodes, placed in appropriate locations relative to incoming user traffic, can greatly improve data latency experienced by application users. For example, locating nodes on each of the US east and west coasts plus a location in Europe is a good choice for SaaS, e-commerce or general web applications servicing North American and European users.

pgEdge Distributed Postgres can scale to a higher number of nodes using a hierarchical replication architecture to keep replication traffic between nodes at a manageable level. This is not currently supported for production usage – please contact pgEdge support to determine if your application needs this capability.

We currently support AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

If you have a large potential deployment and need support for a different cloud provider, please reach out—we’re happy to discuss additional options based on customer demand.

We believe the traditional SaaS model, where the vendor provisions and manages cloud infrastructure, does not scale well for customers or vendors. When vendors resell cloud infrastructure, it often results in higher costs and introduces security challenges. Enterprise security teams frequently need visibility and assurance over the configuration of cloud environments, and this is difficult to achieve with fully vendor-managed SaaS.

Using a BYO account model provides several key advantages:

• Lower cost. Customers can take advantage of their existing enterprise discounts and committed cloud spend.

• Stronger security. The infrastructure runs entirely within the customer’s own cloud account, allowing security teams to apply their own controls and monitoring.

• Better compliance and control. Internal tools such as Wiz, Orca, and Palo Alto Prisma can be used without restriction, and governance requirements are easier to meet.

Our team includes professionals with extensive experience in cloud security. Based on what we have seen across the industry, allowing customers to maintain full ownership of their infrastructure is the most secure and scalable model.

pgEdge Enterprise Postgres is our single-cluster, non-Distributed Postgres distribution with enterprise-grade extensions and full commercial support. It is ideal for organizations that want a supported PostgreSQL deployment without the complexity of geo-distribution, while maintaining the option to upgrade to distributed later. Subscriptions include support, updates, and integration with pgEdge tooling. Please email sales@pgedge.com for detailed pricing.

pgEdge Distributed VM Edition is free to download and use for development and evaluation. For production deployments, we offer subscription plans that include enterprise support, certified binaries, updates, and access to advanced features. Pricing is competitive with other commercially supported PostgreSQL-based offerings. Please reach out to sales@pgedge.com for more information.

Pricing for pgEdge Distributed Postgres:Cloud Edition is competitive with other managed PostgreSQL DBaaS offerings, while providing the added benefits of distributed, multi-region, active-active deployment. Please contact us at sales@pgedge.com for current pricing and deployment options.