Copy-and-Replay vs Branch-at-a-Point: Two Backup Recovery Paths
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Supabasejoe_sciarrino, alexander_korotkov, daniel_mitterdorfer, aditya_maruvadaAnnouncement
Scale without limits: Multigres, OrioleDB, and dbarena
Summary
At Supabase Select, Supabase announced Multigres for high availability and connection pooling, OrioleDB for high performance storage, and dbarena for transparent benchmarking. Multigres is an open source operating system for Postgres that adds scalable connection pooling and automated multi-node failover using a consensus protocol built on synchronous replication, preventing data loss during failover. OrioleDB replaces Postgres’s heap storage with an undo log-based engine that eliminates bloat, VACUUM overhead, and transaction ID wraparound by using 64-bit transaction IDs, delivering up to 1.8x higher throughput in TPC-C-derived benchmarks. dbarena.com is an open benchmarks site that publishes reproducible performance and cost comparisons across managed Postgres providers including Supabase, Amazon RDS, and Google Cloud SQL, with full methodology and raw data. These tools aim to remove scaling limitations at every layer of Postgres, with all improvements being open source and available to the community.
Context
Scaling Postgres involves multiple bottlenecks: concurrent connections, heap storage bloat, VACUUM overhead, transaction ID wraparound, and failover data loss. Supabase announced Multigres for connection pooling and failover, OrioleDB for storage, and dbarena for benchmarking to address these.
Approach / What changed
Multigres uses a consensus protocol on synchronous replication for failover and built-in connection pooling. OrioleDB replaces heap with an undo log engine using 64-bit XIDs. dbarena publishes reproducible benchmarks with full methodology.
Takeaways
Multigres uses a consensus protocol built on Postgres synchronous replication to guarantee no committed writes are lost during failover, and it runs three nodes across availability zones.
OrioleDB eliminates bloat and VACUUM overhead by using an undo log instead of heap storage, and it uses 64-bit transaction IDs to avoid wraparound.
dbarena provides open, reproducible benchmarks comparing Supabase, Amazon RDS, and Google Cloud SQL, with transactions per dollar, monthly cost, and raw data.
FAQ
How does Multigres prevent data loss during failover?
Multigres uses a consensus protocol built on Postgres synchronous replication. When a node fails, the cluster agrees on which writes were committed before promoting a replica, ensuring no committed writes are lost.
What problem does OrioleDB solve with VACUUM?
OrioleDB eliminates the need for VACUUM by using an undo log instead of heap storage. Updates and deletes write page-level undo records that are automatically reclaimed, removing bloat and VACUUM overhead.
How does dbarena ensure benchmark reproducibility?
dbarena publishes the benchmark code, methodology, downloadable raw data per result, and shareable comparison links. Every result can be checked independently.
Source and freshness
- Source
- supabase.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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