postgresml/pgcat

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4009 stars · 265 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

PgCat is a PostgreSQL connection pooler and proxy written in Rust, similar to PgBouncer, with support for sharding, load balancing, failover, and query mirroring. It is multi-threaded, production-tested at high query volumes, and exposes statistics via an admin database and Prometheus.

Use cases

• pool postgres connections for a high-traffic app
• load balance read queries across postgres replicas
• automatically fail over when a postgres replica goes down
• shard postgres queries across multiple databases
• mirror production traffic to a staging postgres server
• replace pgbouncer with a multi-threaded pooler
• monitor postgres pool statistics with prometheus

When to choose

• you need transaction or session pooling beyond what PgBouncer offers
• you want automatic load balancing and failover across replicas
• you need query sharding or traffic mirroring
• you run Postgres at high query-per-second volumes on multicore machines

When to avoid

• you need only the simplest pooling setup and already run PgBouncer happily
• you rely on experimental features like automatic sharding in critical production paths
• you don't run PostgreSQL

Facets

service · maturity stable

database proxy load-testing monitoring security databases backend infrastructure-as-code rust self-hosted postgresql pooler pgbouncer-alternative sharding failover load-balancing connection-pooling tokio devops linux macos docker

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="postgresml/pgcat")