EnterpriseDB Corp., which sells a commercial version of the popular open-source Postgres database management system, today announced version 5.0 of EDB Postgres Distributed with new high-availability features, easier installation and the ability to integrate with the Open Telemetry suite of observability tools.

The company, which was acquired by Bain Capital LP in June, said the new version delivers up to 99.999% uptime with “active-active” technology, which uses a network of independent processing nodes that each have access to a common replicated database.

“We’ve introduced some next-generation connection routing capabilities that make it easier for users to manage how connections are getting routed from the application to the writable database nodes,” said Chief Product Engineering Officer Jozef de Vries (pictured). “We also introduced some improvements around commit-at-most-once models. It’s a capability that we see a lot of demand for, but it hasn’t been at the performance levels that we wanted.”

Managed replication

Availability is managed through replication across regions with customers having the option to use geographic redundancy for additional protection. “This allows for backups across regions, or customers can create a parallel three-node cluster in a second region and configure replication between those two,” de Vries said. “If a whole region goes down, the application can just fail over to that other location without incurring any downtime.”

This release is also significantly easier for customers to install and configure, he said. Postgres Distributed “can be a pretty complicated system and historically has required a fair amount of engagement from our professional services and support teams to help customers become successful,” de Vries said. “Over the last three releases, we have made a big push to make it a more self-sustaining piece of software that users can pull down off the shelf, deploy and use by themselves.”

Building block architecture

Configuration flexibility is enhanced through the use of what he called a “building block” architecture. “You can start with a base configuration in a single region and as your availability requirements increase you can scale those building blocks across regions or within a region to achieve higher degrees of availability.”

The use of preconfigured blocks also allows configuration to be done in a repeatable and consistent manner. “This tooling allows them to verify that everything has been configured in a way that leads to a sustainable and stable database system,” de Vries said.

This is also the first release to be available with a 60-day free trial. Although open-source Postgres is always free, the enterprise version with advanced replication and distributed database features has previously been available only with a paid license.

EDB Postgres Distributed 5.0 is immediately available through the EDB Extreme High Availability license plan. The new features will also be incorporated into the company’s BigAnimal managed database-as-a-service within the next four to five months, de Vries said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE