Gaea vs SPQR
Gaea
github.comSPQR
docs.pg-sharding.techSide by side
| Figure | Gaea | SPQR |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Database Proxy Software | 7.2 (#25) | 7.8 (#9) |
| Deployment | The quick start says Gaea is written in Go and can be compiled into gaea and gaea-cc executables for local use. | The getting-started guide provides a Docker image and lists router, admin console, and gRPC API ports as 6432, 7432, and 7000. |
| Integrations | The project documentation names etcd for configuration and Grafana for monitoring dashboards. | The FAQ says SPQR works with managed PostgreSQL databases including Yandex Managed PostgreSQL and AWS RDS, and names pgx and JDBC as compatible driver examples. |
| Intended users | The README says Gaea is used across mobile, automotive, ecosystem-chain, finance, and internet businesses. | SPQR is presented as a fit for PostgreSQL developers who want to avoid application-level sharding logic and workloads suited to single-shard OLTP queries. |
| License | The GitHub repository identifies the project as licensed under Apache-2.0. | The source is distributed under the PostgreSQL Global Development Group License. |
| Maker | The repository says Gaea is developed by Xiaomi’s B2C development team. | The documentation says SPQR was designed by the Data Platform team of Yandex.Cloud. |
| Product | Gaea is a MySQL protocol database middleware and proxy developed by Xiaomi’s B2C development team. | SPQR is a production-ready system for horizontally scaling PostgreSQL through sharding. |
Plans
In their own words
SPQR
SPQR is a self-hosted query router for horizontally scaling PostgreSQL through sharding. It can extract a sharding key from a query and route it to the relevant key range and shard when possible; keys can use one column or several. Queries can also specify a key or shard in a SQL comment. Applications connect using the PostgreSQL protocol, and the router and coordinator provide administrative consoles accessible through psql. SPQR supports one-phase and two-phase commit strategies; two-phase commit provides atomicity across shards and requires max_prepared_transactions greater than zero on each shard. The system can move data between shards to balance workload, and the project describes reducing transferred ranges to limit locking impact. Its documentation includes Docker and configuration-file deployment instructions. SPQR is free and distributed under the PostgreSQL Global Development Group License. The FAQ cautions that it is not suited to complex cross-shard queries, transactions modifying multiple shards or OLAP workloads, and reports a roughly 10–30% performance drop versus vanilla PostgreSQL depending on workload.