PostgreSQL backup tool gets some backup of its own after sole maintainer sounds alarm

Databases

AWS, Percona, Supabase, pgEdge, and Tiger Data rally round pgBackRest with funding pledge

A group of companies including AWS and
Percona have stepped up to fund the maintenance of pgBackRest, an extension to the widely used open source database PostgreSQL, after its future was left hanging in the balance.

The tool provides a backup and restore
solution for the PostgreSQL RDBMS, which has become more or less ubiquitous in
services offered by cloud providers including AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure.

It had been maintained for the last 13 years by David Steele, a principal architect at Crunchy Data – which
provides PostgreSQL managed cloud services, Kubernetes deployments, and
on-prem solutions – until June last year. At that time, cloud data analytics
company Snowflake bought Crunchy Data to help provide a transactional
database.

A Snowflake spokesperson said: “Open source software is built on broad community participation, and we are pleased to see continued support for pgBackRest from organizations across the ecosystem. Snowflake supports a variety of open source projects, including within the Postgres ecosystem, and we look forward to continued community collaboration.”

Last month, Steele announced he was no
longer able to maintain the project. “Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been
maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to
continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts
to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the
project viable,” he said.

Steele said he was hoping to continue the
project, but lack of support was forcing him to consider new roles that would not leave him enough time.

A group of interested companies have now banded
together to fund ongoing development. “Their support means the project is no
longer reliant on a single sponsor, giving pgBackRest the stability it needs
for the long term,” Steele said.

As well as AWS and Percona, sponsors
include Supabase, which provides a back-end platform built on PostgreSQL, and pgEdge,
which offers open source distributed PostgreSQL.

Open source consultancy and technology
company Percona said thousands of organizations depend on the pgBackRest
extension for backup and recovery of PostgreSQL, including customers
running Percona’s Expert Support for PostgreSQL.

“pgBackRest has been our recommended
backup solution/tool for years. When its future came into question,
coordinating with other companies to keep it healthy was a straightforward
decision – for our customers and for the community,” said Percona CEO Peter Farkas.

The group of companies, which also includes
Tiger Data, creators of TimescaleDB, have committed to supporting bug
fixes, feature work, and community reviews. Percona said it plans to bring a new maintainer on board who can help provide continuity in the long term. The project is also looking to recruit more sponsors and reduce reliance on a single maintainer. ®