July 7, 2026
Who let the settings leak?
Why we built yet another Postgres connection pooler
Database fans are split as one team says old tools break apps in sneaky ways
TLDR: PgDog says it built a new way to help many apps share one Postgres database without breaking common features that older tools often force people to give up. Commenters were split between exhausted developers saying those breakages are painfully real and skeptics questioning whether PgDog’s fixes are too good to be true.
A new database helper called PgDog has arrived with the classic tech-world energy of "yes, we built another one" and the crowd immediately turned the comment section into group therapy. The company says existing tools that help lots of apps share one database can quietly break things people depend on, like temporary settings and built-in messaging. Their big pitch is simple: stop forcing developers to rewrite huge chunks of old code just to keep the database from choking on too many users.
And wow, the replies were a mix of relief, suspicion, and battle scars. One developer basically showed up waving a torn shirt, saying they had just moved their app to a popular tool and got hit by a surprise side effect: a feature they relied on suddenly stopped working, so they had to disable it all over the app. Another commenter reacted like they’d just seen a horror movie: "Wow this is very bad", stunned that one user’s settings can spill into another’s session in normal setups. That was the thread’s biggest mood: wait, this is real?
But not everyone was ready to hand PgDog a trophy. Skeptics immediately poked at the company’s claim that it preserves message delivery rules while also improving performance, with one commenter essentially asking, "So... did you secretly stop keeping the promise?" Others tossed in wishlist chaos, asking for bonus features like query caching, while another linked a rival company’s post as if to say, cute launch, but the competition is already in the ring. In short: part launch, part support group, part cage match
Key Points
- •PgDog is a Postgres scaling proxy whose connection pooler is designed to avoid application-level trade-offs common with existing poolers.
- •The article argues that traditional poolers such as PgBouncer and RDS Proxy create a leaky abstraction by forcing changes in how applications use the database.
- •A key problem described is session-state leakage with pooled connections, especially around SET commands and features like Row Level Security that depend on session variables.
- •PgDog uses a built-in SQL parser to detect, store, and replay SET state per client, and uses query pipelining to reduce synchronization overhead.
- •PgDog also implements internal handling for LISTEN/NOTIFY across multiple processes while claiming to preserve NOTIFY’s transactional semantics.