Heimdall Database Proxy vs pgagroal

Heimdall Database Proxy is a data access layer between an application and its database, routing, caching, and securing SQL queries. It can send reads to replicas and writes to primary databases, with replication-lag detection to support consistency. Frequently used queries can be cached with automatic expiry and invalidation rules to reduce database load and latency. Connection pooling can reduce front-side to back-side connections by up to a 1000:1 ratio. The proxy provides live SQL visibility, bottleneck identification, and auto-tuning recommendations, and can run as a transparent sidecar on-premise or in the cloud. Supported databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS, Oracle, SQL Server, MariaDB, DB2, Greenplum, and Redshift. Listed cloud integrations include AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud, and Redis. Active Directory integration supports authentication and authorization. Enterprise Plus includes data masking, GDPR auditing, and honey-tokens. A free Greenplum Community Edition is available for Greenplum use, with pooling, LDAP synchronization for one server, and SQL performance analytics. The AWS Marketplace listing offers a free 30-day trial; technical support for the Community Edition requires an Enterprise upgrade.

pgagroal is a free, self-hosted PostgreSQL connection pool for Linux and macOS. It supports per-user and per-database connection limits, pool prefill, idle connection removal, and connection validation. Administrators can enable or disable database access and choose graceful or fast shutdown. Remote management and command-line tools handle runtime administration and user management. Monitoring exports Prometheus metrics and includes a Grafana 12 dashboard. Authentication can use database-backed queries or a user vault for credentials. If a PostgreSQL server can no longer accept writes, pgagroal can trigger an external failover workflow. The project lists TLS v1.2+ and describes both server-only and mutual certificate authentication. It works with PostgreSQL-compliant drivers including pgjdbc, Npgsql, and pq. Tested systems listed include Fedora 38+, RHEL 9.x, Rocky Linux 9.x, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD; releases list packages through Fedora 42/43, RHEL 10, and Rocky Linux 10. The repository identifies a BSD-3-Clause license. GitHub is used for questions, issues, feature requests, and code contributions.