Recently Google announced the general availability (GA) of AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, a fully-managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service providing scale-out compute and storage, integrated analytics, and AI/ML-powered management.
Earlier, the company released a preview of the service at Google I/O and since added new features such as customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and VPC Service Controls, a preview of cross-region replication, new two vCPU /16 GB RAM machine type, and support for additional PostgreSQL extensions like pgRouting, PLV8, and amcheck. In addition, the company introduced the preview of an index advisor and, more recently, new fleet-wide monitoring to improve manageability.
Andi Gutmans, a VP of engineering databases at Google, tweeted:
I am excited to see the AlloyDB fleet health monitoring launch in public preview. This feature will enable customers to view summary information at a project level for areas like CPU utilization, replication lag, and more...!
One of the key features of AlloyDB is its ability to improve the performance of PostgreSQL databases. It provides optimized indexing and query processing, automatic query optimization, and parallel query execution. These features can significantly improve the speed and efficiency of database operations, making it easier for users to work with large and complex databases.
Ravi Murthy, an engineering director AlloyDB at Google, claims in a Google Cloud blog post:
Based on our performance tests, AlloyDB is more than four times faster for transactional workloads and up to 100 times faster for analytical queries than standard PostgreSQL. It’s also two times faster for transactional workloads than Amazon’s comparable PostgreSQL-compatible service.
Other public cloud providers Microsoft and AWS also host PostgreSQL-compatible database services like AlloyDB. Microsoft offers Azure Database for PostgreSQL and even recently released Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, which combines the Postgres-based scale-out database technology the company acquired from Citus Data with its globally-distributed Azure Cosmos DB database service. And AWS offers PostgreSQL-compatible database services like Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL.
Andrew Brown, CEO at ExamPro, tweeted:
I love watching this game of cloud tennis. ☁️
AWS: Hey, use Babelfish and move MSSQL servs to Postgres us
GCP: Hey, we made this supercharged version of Postgres called AlloyDB; migrate to us
Azure: Hey, we now support Postgres on CosmoDB; no need to move
With the GA release, Google also announced the expansion of the AlloyDB partner ecosystem with several new partnerships for over 50 technology and service partners to support customers with AlloyDB-based deployments.
Lastly, compute resources for AlloyDB are priced per vCPU, and GB of memory and storage prices depend on the region.