Using HyPer with PostgreSQL drivers

using a database from within an application requires language bindings, database drivers, etc., Support  a large range of languages is requires a lot of effort, therefore we have decided to emulate the PostgreSQL wire protocol in HyPer. The immediate benefit is that it is now possible to use HyPer with many existing tools, including psql and the PostgreSQL JDBC driver.

To try it out, download the updated binary, unpack it, create a new database instance using

bin/hyperdb --initdb mydatabase

And start the database server (note that you need to add -i is you plan to use TCP, for example for the JDBC driver)

bin/hyperdb mydatabase

Now we can connect using the regular PostgerSQL tools, for example by using

psql -h /tmp -p 7483

The PostgreSQL wire protocol emulation is still relatively new, but it should be usable already. Please send us a note if you encounter bugs or missing features.

A more detailed description of how to use that setup together with the DBT-3 setup can be found here. We had to fix some bugs in the original DBT-3 release to get it running, but now we can run nearly exactly the same benchmark script in PostgrSQL and HyPer (we are working on fixing the remaining issues).

Of course while we want to emulate the PostgreSQL interface for compatibility reasons, the actual implementation is completely different. We have some performance numbers for SF-10 on PostgreSQL and on HyPer online, and the composite score of HyPer is roughly a factor 45 better than the score of PostgreSQL.