EnterpriseDB Corp., which sells a commercial version of the popular open-source PostgreSQL database management system, today announced that its distributed PostgreSQL version is now available as a fully managed service on the company’s EDB BigAnimal platform.

The announcement comes six months after the company announced version 5.0 of EDB PostgreSQL Distributed with high availability features that achieve 99.999% uptime. The software uses “active-active” technology across a network of independent processing nodes and replicated databases to permit organizations to apply updates and perform maintenance incrementally without taking the entire database down.

EDB PostgreSQL Distributed can be used across a global network with automatic rerouting of workloads to operational instances in case of node failure. That improves availability, performance and scalability.

Much of the distributed technology came from 2ndQuadrant Ltd., a leading PostgreSQL contributor that Enterprise DB acquired in 2020. “They had some technology we were interested in and the big part was PostgreSQL Distributed,” said Chandler Hoisington, EnterpriseDB’s chief product officer. We released on-premises but it’s a complex thing to manage yourself. While we provide help, it is still complex. Now we are able to deliver value in a simpler way.”

Scalability and resilience

The distributed architecture enables organizations to scale horizontally, a capability that was nearly impossible before EnterpriseDB released the distributed version, Hoisington said. Active-active technology enables the company to deliver a service level agreement of 99.995% uptime for multi-region clusters.

“With BigAnimal we believe we can give you four nines and were hoping to push the boundaries even farther in the future,” Hoisington said. Users can also implement controls in multi-region clusters to replicate data selectively, a useful capability in regulatory environments that require data residency.

Active-active technology is of particular value to global organizations that need to coordinate transactions across many regions, Hoisington said. “They need the ability for a customer to be able to swipe a credit card in Mumbai and her husband swipe a card in Chennai and have both those transactions accurately recorded,” he said. “For that, you need databases in each region available for writes and reads with conflicts resolved very quickly.”

The architecture also provides for continuous disaster recovery readiness without the need for database interaction during failover and reduces access latency by balancing database loads across clusters. EnterpriseDB said its cloud version is capable of supporting cloud-native applications that process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

“It also helps with maintenance,” Hoisington said. “We can do things like rebuild indexes and eventually perform zero-downtime upgrades because you have multiple servers in the cluster that you can take offline and route traffic to all the others.”

The company expects to offer users the ability to deploy to production on a server-by-server basis, which is “something you can’t do with the standard architecture in Postgres,” he said.

PostgreSQL, whose logo is an elephant, was voted the most admired database among the 32 candidates measured in Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey. More than 70% of the nearly 76,000 respondents said they used PostgreSQL last year and intend to continue using it.

Subscription pricing is on a consumption basis. EnterpriseDB publishes its pricing schedule on its website.

Photo: Unsplash