pgEdge has unveiled pgEdge ColdFront, a transparent data tiering solution for PostgreSQL that unifies AI, analytical, and OLTP workloads on a single platform. Unlike other tiering solutions, ColdFront's cold tier is fully writable—UPDATE and DELETE operations work on archived rows through the same SQL the application already uses, with no code changes and no rehydration required.
Key features and changes:
- Transparent data tiering: Older data is automatically moved to Apache Iceberg in Parquet format on any S3-compatible object store, reducing storage costs by up to 90%.
- Full read/write on cold tier: Archived rows remain accessible via
UPDATEandDELETEthrough the original Postgres table name—no application modifications needed. - Unified query access: The complete dataset stays readable and writable through a single Postgres table name, simplifying application logic.
- Analytical-speed cold scans: Cold-tier scans leverage the DuckDB vectorized columnar engine, delivering analytical performance on historical data without moving it back to hot storage.
- Reduced operational overhead: Lower storage costs, less vacuum overhead, and decreased replica lag compared to keeping all data on primary storage.
For developers, this means eliminating the trade-off between storage cost and data accessibility. ColdFront allows you to retain historical data for AI and analytical workloads without sacrificing transactional performance or requiring complex application rewrites. The ability to UPDATE and DELETE in the cold tier ensures that data governance and compliance needs are met seamlessly. By unifying hot and cold storage behind a single Postgres interface, pgEdge ColdFront simplifies database architecture and reduces total cost of ownership, making it an attractive option for growing PostgreSQL deployments.