pgrundev / pgx

PGX 
 PGX. Postgres for agents. 🐘 
 One runtime. Thousands of Postgres databases.
 [code] 
 No Docker required · Native Mac & Linux · Automatic cleanup
 Open source · Free · Beta · Built for disposable development databases 
PGX is a database runtime for short-lived Postgres databases: agent
sandboxes, CI and per-PR databases, test and preview environments. One PGX
process holds many isolated databases. Each costs tens of kilobytes of
memory while idle, is created in milliseconds from a sealed template, and
is backed, on a copy-on-write storage backend such as ZFS, by a clone
that starts at a few megabytes whatever the template's size (on a
filesystem without block cloning a branch is a full copy).
PGX speaks the Postgres wire protocol and SQL dialect. Rails, Django,
Prisma, SQLAlchemy and node-postgres run their full migrate → test →
schema-change lifecycles on it unchanged.
PGX is the database engine behind PGRun branches.
> A database should be cheap enough to allocate like an object, not
> provision like a server.
## Why PGX
Agent workflows, test suites, CI jobs and preview environments create
databases constantly and throw them away minutes or hours later. Giving
each one its own PostgreSQL server costs a process, tens of megabytes and
a cold start every time. Traditional PostgreSQL is built to keep one
database running for years; PGX is built to create one in milliseconds,
use it briefly and delete it.
Instead of
 [code] 
PGX runs
 [code] 
Immutable state is shared. Each database pays mainly for what makes it
different.
## At a glance
 [code] 
These describe measured configurations and workloads, not a claim that
PGX is faster than PostgreSQL in general. The detail and the scripts are
under Benchmarks.
## Disposable Postgres
PGX is built around a different database lifecycle:
 [code] 
A database is created from a sealed template without copying it. On
Linux, ZFS block cloning lets a branch share every unchanged block with
its template, so a branch of a 10 GB database is ready in under a second
and starts at about 14 MB of its own storage.
## Built for agents
A coding agent's database workload looks like this, and many agents do it
at once:
 [code] 
PGX optimizes for that lifecycle rather than for a long-running
production primary. Every agent, every pull request and every test run
can have its own real Postgres-compatible database.
## Benchmarks
Measured on a 4 vCPU / 8 GB / $8.50-a-month VPS with ZFS block cloning. The
load generator ran on the same CPUs, so these are architecture numbers,
not capacity limits. Every figure has a script and a committed raw result
(`benchmarks/pgx/linux/README.md`).
### Density
| | PGX |
|---|---|
| 1000 idle databases in one runtime | **128–155 MB** in total |
| 1000 databases, each queried once | **213 MB** |
| Per idle database | ~70 KB untouched, ~128 KB once queried |
| 1000 databases with 100 active | 283 MB |
| Idle CPU with 1000 databases | 0.33–0.43 % of one core |
For comparison, one idle PostgreSQ