Heimdall Database Proxy vs ShardingSphere-Proxy

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.

ShardingSphere-Proxy is a self-hosted database proxy that gives clients a database server interface over a binary protocol. Its listed client protocols are MySQL, PostgreSQL, openGauss, and Firebird. It distributes storage and computing across underlying databases through sharding, and provides distributed transactions with a hybrid XA and BASE engine. Read/write splitting balances reads using SQL semantics and awareness of database topology. Other capabilities include migration with sharding, federated queries, transparent encryption, and data masking.

You can deploy it from a binary distribution, as a Docker image, or with Helm. The binary requires Java JRE 8 or higher; Docker needs no additional dependency. For a MySQL backend, the Proxy ext-lib directory needs mysql-connector-j-8.4.0.jar. The project is free at free. Support for system databases and tables such as information_schema and pg_catalog is limited, and some graphical database clients may show errors.