🐘🤘 Hydra

Hydra is open source, column-oriented Postgres. You can query billions of rows instantly on Postgres without code changes. Parallelized analytics in minutes, not weeks.

🚀 Quick start

Try the Hydra Free Tier to create a column-oriented Postgres instance. Then connect to it with your preferred Postgres client (psql, dbeaver, etc).

Alternatively, you can run Hydra locally.

💪 Benchmarks - fastest Postgres aggregates on earth

Benchmarks were run on a c6a.4xlarge (16 vCPU, 32 GB RAM) with 500 GB of GP2 storage. Results in seconds, smaller is better.

Hydra - the open source data warehouse

Review Clickbench for comprehensive results and the list of 42 queries tested.

This benchmark represents typical workload in the following areas: clickstream and traffic analysis, web analytics, machine-generated data, structured logs, and events data.

Hydra - the open source data warehouse

For our continuous benchmark results, see BENCHMARKS.

🙋 FAQs

View complete answers in our documentation.

Q: Why is Hydra so fast?

A: Columnar storage, query parallelization, vectorized execution, column-level caching, and tuning Postgres.

Q: How do I start using the columnar format on Postgres?

A: Data is loaded into columnar format by default. Use Postgres normally.

Q: What operations is Hydra meant for? Provide examples.

A: Aggregates (COUNT, SUM, AVG), WHERE clauses, bulk INSERTS, UPDATE, DELETE…

Q: What is columnar not meant for?

A: Frequent large updates, small transactions…

Q: What Postgres features are unsupported on columnar?

Logical replication.
Columnar tables don’t typically use indexes, only supporting btree and hash indexes, and their associated constraints.

Q: Is Hydra a fork?

A: Hydra is a Postgres extension, not a fork. Hydra makes use of tableam (table access method API), which was added in Postgres 12 released in 2019.

🤝 Community and Status

Alpha: Limited to select design partners
Public Alpha: available for use, but with noted frictions
Hydra 1.0 beta: Stable for non-enterprise use cases
Hydra 1.0 Release: Generally Available (GA) and ready for production use

:technologist: Developer resources

CHANGELOG for details of recent changes
GitHub Issues for bugs and missing features
Discord discussion with the Community and Hydra team
Docs for Hydra features and warehouse ops

💻 Run locally

The Hydra Docker image is a drop-in replacement for postgres Docker image.

You can try out Hydra locally using docker-compose.

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

📝 License

Hydra is only possible by building on the shoulders of giants.

The code in this repo is licensed under:

AGPL 3.0 for Hydra Columnar
All other code is Apache 2.0

The docker image is built on the Postgres docker image, which contains a large number of open source projects, including:

Postgres - the Postgres license
Debian or Alpine Linux image, depending on the image used
Hydra includes the following additional software in the image:
- multicorn - BSD license
- mysql_fdw - MIT-style license
- parquet_s3_fdw - MIT-style license
- pgsql-http - MIT license

As for any pre-built image usage, it is the image user's responsibility to ensure that any use of this image complies with any relevant licenses for all software contained within.

hydra_columnar