What does it take to build a Postgres specialized data movement tool?

Every datastore is unique with a diverse set of features and data modeling characteristics. For example PostgreSQL has 4 ways to ingest data, 5 ways to read data, 300+ data types and 300+ database configs. Building data movement solutions that scale, therefore, requires emphasis to the unique design and capabilities of each datastore.

However, most existing data movement tools focus on breadth over quality of connectors. They often fail at scale due to painfully slow syncs, lack of reliability, and lack of features. These challenges are reflected in the number of companies building in-house solutions and maintaining large data engineering teams.

At PeerDB, we are building a specialized data movement tool for Postgres, the world’s most adopted Open Source Database. We are doing so with an emphasis on the intricacies of Postgres, to provide a high quality experience for moving data in and out of Postgres, from and to other datastores.

In this talk, I will do a deep dive into what it takes to build a Postgres-specialized data movement tool.
1. I will cover the architectural tradeoffs we took - Why we chose a peer-to-peer architecture that keeps data-stores at the center vs a hub-and-spoke one that optimizes for the breadth of connectors?
2. How are we implementing several Postgres native and infrastructural optimizations from day one including -
a. how we partition a Postgres table using internal tuple identifiers (CTIDs) and implement parallel snapshotting to move TBs of data in hrs vs days;
b. how we preserve data type nativity while moving specialized types such as Geospatial, JSONB etc.;
c. how we are building a Postgres-compatible SQL layer written in rust to easily build and manage data-pipelines.
3. To sum it up, I will share what needs to go into Postgres upstream to make data movement a first class citizen