paradedb/pg_analytics: DuckDB-powered analytics for Postgres

pg_analytics (formerly named pg_lakehouse) puts DuckDB inside Postgres. With pg_analytics installed, Postgres can query foreign object stores like AWS S3 and table formats like Iceberg or Delta Lake. Queries are pushed down to DuckDB, a high performance analytical query engine.

pg_analytics uses DuckDB v1.0.0 and is supported on Postgres 13+.

Today, a vast amount of non-operational data — events, metrics, historical snapshots, vendor data, etc. — is ingested into data lakes like AWS S3. Querying this data by moving it into a cloud data warehouse or operating a new query engine is expensive and time-consuming. The goal of pg_analytics is to enable this data to be queried directly from Postgres. This eliminates the need for new infrastructure, loss of data freshness, data movement, and non-Postgres dialects of other query engines.

pg_analytics uses the foreign data wrapper (FDW) API to connect to any object store or table format and the executor hook API to push queries to DuckDB. While other FDWs like aws_s3 have existed in the Postgres extension ecosystem, these FDWs suffer from two limitations:

1. Lack of support for most object stores and table formats
2. Too slow over large datasets to be a viable analytical engine

pg_analytics differentiates itself by supporting a wide breadth of stores and formats and by being very fast (thanks to DuckDB).

The easiest way to use the extension is to run the ParadeDB Dockerfile:

docker run --name paradedb -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password paradedb/paradedb
docker exec -it paradedb psql -U postgres

This will spin up a PostgreSQL 16 instance with pg_analytics preinstalled.

Because this extension uses Postgres hooks to intercept and push queries down to DuckDB, it is very important that it is added to shared_preload_libraries inside postgresql.conf.

# Inside postgresql.conf
shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_analytics'

This ensures the best query performance from the extension.

We provide prebuilt binaries for Debian, Ubuntu, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Postgres 14+. You can download the latest version for your architecture from the GitHub Releases page.

At this time, we do not provide prebuilt binaries for macOS. If you are running Postgres on macOS and want to install pg_analytics, please follow the development instructions, replacing cargo pgrx run by cargo pgrx install --release. This will build the extension from source and install it in your macOS Postgres instance (e.g. Homebrew).

Windows is not supported. This restriction is inherited from pgrx not supporting Windows.

The following example uses pg_analytics to query an example dataset of 3 million NYC taxi trips from January 2024, hosted in a public us-east-1 S3 bucket provided by ParadeDB.

CREATE EXTENSION pg_analytics;
CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER parquet_wrapper HANDLER parquet_fdw_handler VALIDATOR parquet_fdw_validator;

-- Provide S3 credentials
CREATE SERVER parquet_server FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER parquet_wrapper;

-- Create foreign table with auto schema creation
CREATE FOREIGN TABLE trips ()
SERVER parquet_server
OPTIONS (files 's3://paradedb-benchmarks/yellow_tripdata_2024-01.parquet');

-- Success! Now you can query the remote Parquet file like a regular Postgres table
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM trips;
  count
---------
 2964624
(1 row)

Complete documentation for pg_analytics can be found under the docs folder as Markdown files. It covers how to query the various object stores and file and table formats supports, and how to configure and tune the extension.

A hosted version of the documentation can be found here.

To develop the extension, first install Rust via rustup.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
rustup install version>

rustup default version>

Note: While it is possible to install Rust via your package manager, we recommend using rustup as we’ve observed inconsistencies with Homebrew’s Rust installation on macOS.

Before compiling the extension, you’ll need to have the following dependencies installed.

# macOS
brew install make gcc pkg-config openssl

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install -y make gcc pkg-config libssl-dev libclang-dev

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S core/openssl extra/clang

# macOS
brew install postgresql@17

# Ubuntu
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y postgresql-17 postgresql-server-dev-17

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S extra/postgresql

If you are using Postgres.app to manage your macOS PostgreSQL, you’ll need to add the pg_config binary to your path before continuing:

export PATH="$PATH:/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin"

Then, install and initialize pgrx:

# Note: Replace --pg17 with your version of Postgres, if different (i.e. --pg16)
cargo install --locked cargo-pgrx --version 0.12.7

# macOS arm64
cargo pgrx init --pg17=/opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@17/bin/pg_config

# macOS amd64
cargo pgrx init --pg17=/usr/local/opt/postgresql@17/bin/pg_config

# Ubuntu
cargo pgrx init --pg17=/usr/lib/postgresql/17/bin/pg_config

# Arch Linux
cargo pgrx init --pg17=/usr/bin/pg_config

If you prefer to use a different version of Postgres, update the --pg flag accordingly.

First, start pgrx:

This will launch an interactive connection to Postgres. Inside Postgres, create the extension by running:

CREATE EXTENSION pg_analytics;

You now have access to all the extension functions.

If you make changes to the extension code, follow these steps to update it:

1. Recompile the extension:

2. Recreate the extension to load the latest changes:

DROP EXTENSION pg_analytics;
CREATE EXTENSION pg_analytics;

We use cargo test as our runner for pg_analytics tests. Tests are conducted using testcontainers to manage testing containers like LocalStack. testcontainers will pull any Docker images that it requires to perform the test.

You also need a running Postgres instance to run the tests. The test suite will look for a connection string on the DATABASE_URL environment variable. You can set this variable manually, or use .env file with contents like this:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://@:/

pg_analytics is licensed under the PostgreSQL License.