Postgres-XL 9.5 R1 Beta1 Announced!

The Postgres-XL community is pleased to announce Postgres-XL 9.5 R1 Beta 1.

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.

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: http://www.postgres-xl.org/download/

You can go through XL’s comprehensive documentation here: http://files.postgres-xl.org/documentation/index.html

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 and tuning, the project has now reached the next stage of maturity and we are now ready to have initial users contribute their comments and usage reports to the Postgres-XL community at postgres-xl-bugs@lists.sourceforge.net. 

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.