The Postgres developers recently announced the availability of the first public beta for Postgres 9.6. I would be highly remiss to ignore such an opportunity to dig into any interesting functionality listed in the 9.6 release notes. All in all, it’s a pretty exciting series of advancements, and assuming this is a glimpse of what we see when 9.6 drops, I’d say we’re on the right track.

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way early: dealing with multiple Terabytes or Petabytes in a database context is something of a nightmare. Distributing it, retrieving it, processing it, aggregating and reporting on it, are all complicated—and perhaps worst of all—non-intuitive. Everything from tooling and maintenance, to usage and input, are either ad-hoc or obfuscated by several special-purpose APIs and wrappers.

Having run into a bit of a snag with Postgres-XL, and not wanting to be dead in the water with our project, I went on a bit of a knowledge quest. Database scaling is hard, so I expected a bunch of either abandoned or proprietary approaches. In addition, as a huge fans of Postgres, compatibility or outright use of the Postgres core was a strict prerequisite.

Postgres is a great tool for most databases. Larger installations however, pretty much require horizontal scaling; addressing multi-TB tables relies on multiple parallel storage streams thanks to the laws of physics. It’s how all immense data stores work, and for a long time, Postgres really had no equivalent that wasn’t a home-grown shard management wrapper. To that end, we’ve been considering Postgres-XL as a way to fill that role. At first, everything was going well. Performance tests showed huge improvements, initial deployments uncovered no outright incompatibilities, and the conversion was underway.

Connecting to a Postgres database can be a headache for end users and DBAs alike. Not because of the work involved, but the general irritation of managing passwords—an issue common to any system that requires authentication controls.

The user wants to say, “Who am I? None of your business!”