Postgres-XL 9.5 R1 Released!

Posted on 2016-04-19 by 2ndQuadrant, an EDB Company

The Postgres-XL community is pleased to announce the 1st release of Postgres-XL 9.5. This release has been fully synced up till PostgreSQL 9.5.2.

Postgres-XL is a massively parallel database built on top of, and very closely compatible with PostgreSQL 9.5 and its set of advanced features. Postgres-XL is fully open source and many parts of it will feed back directly or indirectly into later releases of PostgreSQL, as we begin to move towards a fully parallel sharded version of core PostgreSQL.

Postgres-XL is different because it supports both Business Intelligence and OLTP workloads in the same horizontally scalable server. This allows Postgres-XL to support a diverse range of workloads

  • OLTP workloads that need write-scalability as well as read-scalability
  • Business Intelligence requiring OLAP with massive parallelism
  • Operational Data Store/ Central Data Backbone
  • Distributed Key-Value store using JSONB, similar to NoSQL
  • Internet of Things applications
  • Mixed-workload environments

Star schema style SQL queries exhibit large performance gains from massively parallel processing (MPP). Many queries show fully linear performance gains, for example a 16-node XL cluster is 16 times faster than PostgreSQL on one node. Postgres-XL is able to successfully complete the complex TPC-H business intelligence benchmark, showing its capability to address much more than basic operations.

Besides proving its mettle on Business Intelligence workloads, Postgres-XL has performed remarkably well on OLTP workloads when running pgBench (based on TPC-B) benchmark. In a 4-Node (Scale: 4000) configuration, compared to PostgreSQL, XL gives up to 230% higher TPS (-70% latency comparison) for SELECT workloads and up to 130% (-56% latency comparison) for UPDATE workloads. Yet, it can scale much, much higher than even the largest single node server.

Postgres-XL’s High Availability functionality has also been enhanced in this release. Popular features such as BRIN indexes, JSONB and GIN index compression are fully supported, as are many popular extensions.

Postgres-XL is available for download here: www.postgres-xl.org/download/ You can go through XL’s comprehensive documentation here: files.postgres-xl.org/documentation/

We expect R2 to bring further features to Postgres-XL 9.5 in the next few months.

2ndQuadrant has led the development of Postgres-XL 9.5, building upon the work of many others over a long period of continuous development, with easily more than 10 man years of development. After six months of professional formal alpha-level testing & tuning, and an additional 2 months in Beta phase with user feedback, the project has now reached the next stage of maturity and we are now ready to release it for production use.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2015) under grant agreement n° 318633. Postgres-XL has also received support and assistance from European Space Agency's Gaia project, as well as other users in industry.

For more details, please visit: 2ndQuadrant.com/resources/postgres-xl/