In my product management career, I have never been more excited to make a product announcement. Effective immediately, SharePlex for PostgreSQL (Source) is now available for customers to evaluate. It has been in a private beta for over 4 months and is proving to be exciting technology that we believe will accelerate PostgreSQL adoption. Let me explain…
When I reflect on the origins of SharePlex, I see remarkable parallels with today. In the late 1990s, Oracle databases were being massively adopted. This was pre-RAC, pre-streams, pre-active data guard, etc., and Oracle customers were faced with challenges around maintaining highly available and/or disaster recovery instances and did not have mechanisms for clustering and distributing multiple writable database instances. Enter SharePlex, the first database replication tool in the market. The ability to replicate Oracle databases in real time enabled customers to create flexible Oracle architectures that could meet their most challenging needs.
In 2022, PostgreSQL continues its upward swing in adoption, particularly as a replacement technology for Oracle. But the same problems persist with supporting enterprise-grade architectures with HA/DR/scaling/clustering. There are native capabilities in PostgreSQL, but its flexibility is limited, and you are faced with supporting your own native implementation. You can go with the capabilities provided by a PostgreSQL database vendor, but that risks vendor lock-in. You could use the cloud vendor options, but those only enable read replicas and do not allow for active/active deployments.
These reasons, and a long stream of requests from users, have led us to bring SharePlex for PostgreSQL (Source) to market. In addition to the already available Oracle to PostgreSQL replication, the new beta release supports PostgreSQL to PostgreSQL replication, including active/active with conflict resolution, PostgreSQL to Kafka and PostgreSQL to Oracle replication. I don’t want to spill the beans yet, but our development team is moving at lightning speed and over the upcoming weeks we will be announcing additional market-shifting features that are going to enable customers to start moving the most complex of Oracle environments to PostgreSQL.
Interested in signing up for the SharePlex for PostgreSQL beta? Learn more.