Outgrowing Postgres? Keep using Postgres!
When data and indexes no longer fit in memory Postgres slows down. That’s expected — no single database will solve all problems.
Databases have trade-offs. Postgres is great with high-throughput transactions, but analytics in row-stores are *generally* slower. Like most things, weaknesses become clearer at scale.
Engineering organizations pick the right tools for the right jobs. This approach eventually collides with another great design principle: “Keep it simple as long as you can.” At scale, using many ‘right tools’ breed nostalgia for running a good ol’ Postgres monolith.
Cue the data warehouses. Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, etc have become crucial to most corporate data journeys. They’re a ‘source of truth,’ aggregating data with many data pipelines from SaaS. Data warehouses are fairly complimentary with Postgres, as they compensate for tasks Postgres isn’t designed for.
You should keep it simple (KISS) AND choose the right tool: Outgrowing Postgres? Keep using Postgres!
How?
Hydra: a clever database program that automatically routes your queries to the correct (and fastest!) database always. 🐘 Postgres-compliant SQL is all you need to access any database. Let Hydra intelligently handle database trade-offs so you don’t have to wrestle them in the application layer.
- Postgres-compliant SQL for every database
- Fast queries: routes to fastest database always
- JOIN between databases, cross-database HTAP workloads
- No query re-writes to adopt new databases
Hydra makes it easy to merge operational and analytical workloads. Use a single endpoint for Postgres (OLTP) and Snowflake (OLAP) to simplify how apps access data. Data movement is expensive and slow at scale, so use Hydra to access the data where it lives.
HTAP Snowflake!?
Snowflake is our first integration because its fast analytics are complimentary to Postgres. Hydra appears like a single database with Snowflake’s analytical speeds and Postgres’ transactional throughput. Keep using Postgres-compliant SQL over every database.
Want to scale with Postgres? Get to a better data model quicker by adopting Hydra. Don’t re-write your queries when you transition from PG monolith to (PG + whatever other DB you need).
Thanks for reading! — the Hydra team
