🏠Overview

Hydra makes it easy to scale realtime apps and analytical reporting on Postgres. Develop quicker. Scale faster.

We developed Hydra Columnar, an open source database extension that adds an ultra fast columnar analytics engine to Postgres without the hassle of a database migration or rewriting application code.

The current version of Hydra Columnar is v1.1.1.

Getting Started

Install on macOS

The quickest way to try Hydra Columnar on macOS is using the Postgres Extension Manager pgxman with Homebrew. pgxman is the package manager and community registry for all Postgres extensions. pgxman makes extension installation delightful and makes it easy to discover and use Postgres’ full capabilities in app development.

brew install pgxman/tap/pgxman
pgxman install hydra_columnar

Install on Linux

The easiest way to install Hydra Columnar on Linux operating systems is to use the Postgres Extension Manager pgxman. Run the following command in your terminal and follow the on-screen getting started instructions. Please note: pgxman only supports Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy.

curl -sfL https://install.pgx.sh | sh -
pgxman install hydra_columnar

Deploy on Hydra Cloud

Try the Hydra Free Tier to deploy a Postgres database with hydra_columnar enabled on our fully managed cloud service. With Hydra Cloud, the default table access method is set to columnar. All data loaded into Hydra Cloud is converted and compressed into columnar format for ultra fast analytical performance. Simply connect to it with your preferred Postgres client (psql, dbeaver, etc).

Run with Docker

If you prefer to use docker, Hydra Columnar publishes docker images with every commit. The Hydra Columnar docker image is a drop-in replacement for the standard Postgres image. Clone the Hydra repo, customize the settings as desired, then start Postgres:

git clone https://github.com/hydradatabase/hydra && cd hydra
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up
# in another tab
psql postgres://postgres:hydra@127.0.0.1:5432

Compile from Source

Install dependencies:

POSTGRES_VERSION=16 \
  apt-get install lsb-release gcc make libssl-dev autoconf pkg-config \
  postgresql-${POSTGRES_VERSION} postgresql-server-dev-${POSTGRES_VERSION} \
  libcurl4-gnutls-dev liblz4-dev libzstd-dev

Clone the source code, compile and install:

git clone https://github.com/hydradatabase/hydra.git
cd columnar && ./configure && make install

Need Sample Data?

Sample Datasets

Useful Concepts

FAQs

Row vs Column tables

Batch ingestion vs data streaming