Supporting multi-active replication with geosharding in PostgreSQL

Full support of multi-active logical replication in pgLogical has gone unsupported for many years.  In this talk we will discuss the work we have done to bring back multi-active replication in a new derivative of pgLogical we call Spock. Spock is available as an open source PostgreSQL extension under a community open source license.

High performance web applications increasingly need presentation, compute and data hosted at or near the network edge.  To date being able to place read/write copies of databases at the network edge has been problematic. At a minimum placing data and databases in a handful of cloud regions closer to end users can deliver a superior experience for the end user.  We describe how Spock makes this possible.

Additionally we will cover how we implement geosharding in support of cross-region scale-out and data residency use cases. Recent regulatory developments in the EU, India and elsewhere increasingly require guarantees that data generated by citizens remains resident in-country or in-region. We will show how we have extended the replication algorithms to ensure that sensitive data such as PII does not cross national or regional borders while globally replicating data that is needed across the world.

Finally, time permitting, we will show a demonstration of multi-active bidirectional replication across three continents and multiple clouds, showcasing low latency for database users across multiple geographies.