Sayonora

Sayonora

← Back to home — A Postgres gateway sits between every client and Postgres, the same place a connection pooler does — but pools connections AND enforces policy AND translates other wire protocols, all at that one point.

01 Part of Warp

What "Postgres gateway" means

A connection pooler like PgBouncer solves one problem well: too many client connections for Postgres's own per-connection process model to hold open cheaply. It sits in front of Postgres, holds a small pool of real backend connections, and multiplexes many client connections onto them. Warp sits in that exact same position — in front of Postgres, terminating client connections — but is built to do more than pool: enforce a SQL firewall and connection ACL, admission-control traffic under load (QoS), cache results across every client, and — the part a pooler has no concept of — accept OTHER wire protocols entirely (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and more) and translate their real traffic into Postgres, alongside plain Postgres wire protocol clients.

Warp vs. PgBouncer

Not a replacement claim for every PgBouncer deployment — PgBouncer is a smaller, simpler tool doing one job. The comparison is about scope: what's actually available at the one point in front of Postgres where a gateway lives.

CapabilityPgBouncerWarp
Postgres connection pooling✓✓
Oracle protocol—✓
MySQL protocol—✓
MongoDB protocol—✓
SQL firewall—✓
QoS—✓
Cross-protocol caching—✓
MCP—✓

Warp speaks twelve client protocols in total, not just the four rows above — see the full per-protocol compatibility table. Pooling itself works the same way for a plain Postgres client either way; what's different is everything a gateway can do once it's already the one thing every client connects through.

Why put a gateway in front of Postgres at all

Explore Warp in depth — detailed architecture, comparison →