Pgpool-II is a proxy software that sits between PostgreSQL servers and a PostgreSQL database client. It provides the following features:
Pgpool-II maintains established connections to the PostgreSQL servers, and reuses them whenever a new connection with the same properties (i.e. user name, database, protocol version, and other connection parameters if any) comes in. It reduces the connection overhead, and improves system's overall throughput.
If a database is replicated (because running in either replication mode or master/slave mode), performing a SELECT query on any server will return the same result. Pgpool-II takes advantage of the replication feature in order to reduce the load on each PostgreSQL server. It does that by distributing SELECT queries among available servers, improving the system's overall throughput. In an ideal scenario, read performance could improve proportionally to the number of PostgreSQL servers. Load balancing works best in a scenario where there are a lot of users executing many read-only queries at the same time.
If one of the database servers goes down or becomes unreachable, Pgpool-II will detach it and will continue operations by using the rest of database servers. There are some sophisticated features that help the automated failover including timeouts and retries.
Pgpool-II can perform online recovery of database node by executing one command. When the online recovery is used with the automated fail over, a detached node by fail over is possible to attach as standby node automatically. It is possible to synchronize and attach new PostgreSQL server too.
Pgpool-II can manage multiple PostgreSQL servers. Activating the replication feature makes it possible to create a real time backup on 2 or more PostgreSQL clusters, so that the service can continue without interruption if one of those clusters fails. Pgpool-II has built-in replication (native replication). However user can use external replication features including streaming replication of PostgreSQL.
There is a limit on the maximum number of concurrent connections with PostgreSQL, and new connections are rejected when this number is reached. Raising this maximum number of connections, however, increases resource consumption and has a negative impact on overall system performance. Pgpool-II also has a limit on the maximum number of connections, but extra connections will be queued instead of returning an error immediately. However, you can configure to return an error when the connection limit is exceeded (4.1 or later).
Watchdog can coordinate multiple Pgpool-II, create a robust cluster system and avoid the single point of failure or split brain. To avoid the split brain, you need at least 3 Pgpool-II nodes. Watchdog can perform lifecheck against other pgpool-II nodes, to detect a fault of Pgpool-II. If active Pgpool-II goes down, standby Pgpool-II can be promoted to active, and take over Virtual IP.
In memory query cache allows to save a pair of SELECT statement and its result. If an identical SELECTs comes in, Pgpool-II returns the value from cache. Since no SQL parsing nor access to PostgreSQL are involved, using in memory cache is extremely fast. On the other hand, it might be slower than the normal path in some cases, because it adds some overhead of storing cache data.
Pgpool-II speaks PostgreSQL's backend and frontend protocol, and relays messages between a backend and a frontend. Therefore, a database application (frontend) thinks that Pgpool-II is the actual PostgreSQL server, and the server (backend) sees Pgpool-II as one of its clients. Because Pgpool-II is transparent to both the server and the client, an existing database application can be used with Pgpool-II almost without a change to its source code.
Pgpool-II works on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and most of the UNIX-like architectures. Windows is not supported. Supported PostgreSQL server's versions are 7.4 and higher. You must also make sure that all of your PostgreSQL servers are using the same major version. In addition to this, we do not recommend mixing different PostgreSQL installation with different build options: including supporting SSL or not, to use --disable-integer-datetimes or not, different block size. These might affect part of functionality of Pgpool-II. The difference of PostgreSQL minor versions is not usually a problem. However we do not test every occurrence of minor versions and we recommend to use exact same minor version of PostgreSQL.
There are some restrictions to using SQL via Pgpool-II. See Restrictions for more details.