My colleagues and I are often asked “when will you (2ndQuadrant) contribute BDR to PostgreSQL?”

This makes an interesting assumption: that we have not already done so. We have. Much of BDR has already been contributed to core PostgreSQL, with more to come. All of BDR is under the PostgreSQL license and could be merged into PostgreSQL at any time if the community wished it (but it doesn’t and shouldn’t; see below).

It’s now quite trivial to implement an extension to add simple multi-master on top of the facilities built-in to PostgreSQL 9.5 if you want to. See the work Konstantin Knizhnik and colleagues have been doing, for example. Many if not most of the facilties that make this possible were added for and as part of the BDR project.

There seems to be some widespread misunderstanding about how contributing large pieces of work to PostgreSQL works.

PostgreSQL is a complex piece of software and it’s developed quite conservatively, focusing on correctness and maintainability over pace of development. This means that big “code drops” are not welcome. That’s where multiple features are added at once in changes that affect large parts of many different files across the server. Merging BDR in one go would be just such a code drop. As a result, even though BDR is released under the PostgreSQL license and could simply be merged into PostgreSQL tomorrow that isn’t going to happen – and it shouldn’t.

That doesn’t mean we’re sitting idle, though.

Instead we’ve progressively worked with the rest of the community (including our competitors in the services and consulting space) to get the changes to the core server that BDR needs merged into PostgreSQL over the 9.3, 9.4 and 9.5 development series. The considerable majority of those features are now in place in 9.5, with more being worked on for 9.6. BDR on 9.4 requires quite a big patch to the core PostgreSQL server, wheras on 9.5 it would require very little as a result of all the work that’s been merged.

Now that most of the core server patches are merged we’re working on getting some of the upper layers of the technology into PostgreSQL. Petr and I submitted the pglogical_output plugin to the November commitfest for 9.6 and the team is working to get the downstream/client ready for general availability and submission. The reason we’re doing this is to get it in core and into the hands of users who don’t want to rely on patched servers and big extensions, which BDR undeniably is.

A partial list of patches created for or as part of BDR and merged to core includes:

Background workers (9.3)

Event Triggers (9.3 and 9.4)

Replication slots (9.4)

Logical decoding (9.4)

Enhanced DROP event triggers (9.4)

REPLICA IDENTITY (9.4)

(9.4) Commit Timestamps (9.5)

Replication Origins (9.5)

DDL Deparse hooks (9.5)

Meanwhile we continue to work on getting further core enhancements into place to improve logical replication and multimaster capabilities, with work on sequence access methods, wal messaging, logical decoding enhancements, and more. At the same time we’re contributing extensions that use that work now that the foundations are strong enough to support them.

In other words: we have contributed BDR, and continue to contribute it. Not only have we contributed the code, but we’ve contributed countless hours extracting pieces for submission then revising and editing and changing them to meet community standards.

The latest part of that effort is pglogical, which I’ll discuss in more detail in a follow-up post.