PgEdge Goes Open Source | Hacker News Reader

PgEdge Goes Open Source

pgedge.com

126 pointsBogdanp31 comments

And under the PostgreSQL license, an actual OSI approved one, not a fake open source in name only monstrosity. Very nice!

If you're referring to the post from yesterday, they actually relicensed it as Apache 2.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196173

No, I had in mind different recent announcements when companies selected closed licenses that let you look at the code but not actually use it, then bragged about open sourcing their project.

Announcement title and actual license divergence has made reading these announcements a bit of a chore on HN since you're required now to read the full post. Good on these guys for not open washing their project.

And of course it doesn't help the tedium of reading HN that there's 5 very vocal commentators who want to the world to know that "OSI doesn't own the definition of open source", even though when asked will define open source as "can be commercially restricted".

We definitely really appreciate how open source leads to real innovation and actually useful code; no intention of openwashing here. Thank you for noticing that :-)

Anyone has any experience with PgEdge and can tell us about reliability? :-)

I wanted to try it months ago ... but I stopped when I read in the install documentation :

To configure passwordless sudo, open the /etc/sudoers file, and add a line of the form: %username ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

And the same user should have a password less SSH access with private key ...

It could do better for sure, but it's a just a Get Started guide, I never consider that a Production Ready guide.

Honest question, what's the problem with that? Hinging admin access for some machine on an ssh key seems like not too unusual practice?

From a security point of view, I am not comfortable giving a user unlimited access to the server. I don't know what solution pgEdge is implementing, but granting full access to the server when it should only operate on PostgreSQL is a security concern for me.

the Getting Started guide is definitely a different mindset than what we would recommend for Production Ready, particularly if there's specific security requirements in mind. With that being said, it should be more clear, so we've reported this to our documentation team to make sure it is!

They have an open issue concerning a SIGILL when loading the pgvector extension that hasn't been fixed or seen any activity in a month.

   https://github.com/pgEdge/pgedge-docker/issues/20

Thanks for flagging this. You’re right that the issue sat too long without a response, and that’s on us. We’ve now replied on GitHub and are actively looking into it. It appears the crash may be related to CPU feature mismatches (e.g. missing AVX support when using pgvector), especially in emulated environments like ARM Macs running x86 containers. We’ve asked for system details to help confirm. Happy to dig in and resolve it quickly from here.

I think it’s great they’re opening it up. I hope they have a plan to defend when the hyperscalers show up to pillage beyond providing cloud containers and VMs as a paid service.

Weird, I posted this yesterday, why didn't HN detect the duplicate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203769

Your's has to little upvotes. I think it is only detected as duplicate if it had made the front page in the last few months.

Hm, I've had my submissions deduped before, where the existing post also had few upvotes and was definitely not on the front page.

same

I appreciate the open source foundation! Is the goal of pgEdge functionally aligned or divergent from what CitusDB offers?

Thanks for the feedback! We're pretty excited about it, too :-)

Citus focuses on scaling Postgres via sharding, typically with a single write node and many read replicas. It’s great for high-throughput, analytical workloads. pgEdge, by contrast, is built for geo-distributed, multi-master Postgres — all nodes are writable, with built-in conflict resolution. It prioritizes low latency, availability, and data locality over pure scale-out. So the goals are pretty different.

Is PgEdge Vitess of MySQL ?

I assume given there are two Vitess for Postgres being worked on now they have decided to open source it?

pgEdge came about from a pglogical foundation, actually! from one of our blogs:

> pgEdge emerged in late 2024 as a serverless distributed Postgres managed cloud service, delivering low latency and high availability in three minutes or less. The pgEdge Platform (for on-premises distributed PostgreSQL) as well as pgEdge Cloud (for deploying in the cloud) was largely inspired by the original capabilities of the pgLogical extension.

https://www.pgedge.com/blog/navigating-distributed-postgresq...

This is good news. :)

agreed!! :-)

They really need to dial back on marketing bs. async multimaster takes away consistency. Piling on NewSQL DBS for slow synchronous writes to a quorum of nodes WTF?

async multi-master does trade off consistency for availability and latency. In PACELC terms, pgEdge leans into AP/EL, not CP. It’s built for low-latency local writes across regions, with built-in conflict resolution to manage eventual consistency. Definitely not trying to be a NewSQL quorum-write system. Just a different use case.

I can't tell what it actually is. Too much marketing babble

> pgEdge is a modern distributed database system built on standard PostgreSQL that’s designed for geo-distribution, high availability, and low latency — especially useful for "edge" deployments.

Had to look elsewhere as well...

Also, in that same vein of caginess, they don't call out their pricing. It's one of those, "contact sales" services.

YugabyteDB / CockroachDB like from that description. Curios to see how it competes with multigres.

We're a little different in that we're not just 100% open-source, but also 100% compatible with community PostgreSQL. see https://pgscorecard.com for comparisons between pgEdge and YugabyteDB, CockroachDB on that front.

More thoughts on why we feel that's important here: https://www.pgedge.com/blog/considering-distributed-postgres...

and the Buyer's Guide (https://www.pgedge.com/landing-pages/distributed-postgresql-...) referenced within does list more technical details and comparisons between us and YugabyteDB / CockroachDB.

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