Enhancing operational efficiency and security: EDB Postgres AI’s latest transactional database server and tooling updates
This blog was co-authored by Jack Christie, Dave Stone, Lizzy Nguyen, and Neel Chopra.
Our customers are constantly striving for greater operational efficiency without compromising on security — a balance that is hard to manage. To support this goal, we’re excited to announce a suite of updates to the EDB Postgres AI sovereign data and AI platform. These enhancements, including improved visibility into Postgres estates, ransomware protection for backups, and migration assessment tools, empower customers with greater control and flexibility. Together, these updates streamline and simplify database management for increasingly resilient systems.
Keep reading for a closer look into the specifics of our Q1 2025 release.
Enhanced scalability for management and monitoring
As business demands continue to grow, organizations' database needs expand, leading to larger, more complex Postgres estates that are hard to monitor and manage. Now, enterprises and government agencies need solutions that inform their scaling, security, and architecture decisions. EDB Postgres AI - Postgres Enterprise Manager (PEM) helps today’s CISOs and CTOs address these challenges by improving scalability for large Postgres data estates.
PEM is trusted by hundreds of our customers, so we continue to invest in it to ensure they can drive greater operational efficiency with management, monitoring, and optimization of EDB Postgres and community Postgres databases — and we’re happy to announce general availability of the latest version, PEM 10. This major version update modernizes the user interface to leverage the React framework and pulls in enhancements from the newest versions of pgAdmin.
With PEM 10, customers get support for grouping servers into high availability (HA) clusters including automatic tagging of server roles — for example, primary and replica servers. This change makes the Object Explorer a richer and more accurate reflection of database estate information, helping users to quickly find what they’re looking for.
Customers can also leverage an overhauled custom dashboard builder, streamlining the process of selecting and viewing charts in a way that works for their team. We have added real-time host metrics via the system_stats extension for instant insight into running processes, memory usage, I/O, and more.
Users can now filter SQL Profiler traces to capture only long-running queries, preventing traces from exceeding the maximum size during extended periods of debugging.
Figure 1 - The new clustering and automatic tagging (within Object Explorer on the left drop-down) and real-time system stats (on the dashboard) in Postgres Enterprise Manager
Learn more about how PEM 10 simplifies operations and improves scalability for growing Postgres environments.
Anti-ransomware support
Anti-ransomware support in Barman
With cybercriminals targeting backups in 94% of ransomware attacks last year, having a robust backup and recovery strategy is more critical than ever. The open source tool, Barman, is maintained by EDB to address these requirements with enhanced features like incremental backup, retention policies, and backup reporting.
The new features in Barman combat these increasing anti-ransomware needs. Now, with immutable storage support, Barman prevents unauthorized modification or deletion of Postgres database backups. Barman also provides immutable backups in Amazon Web Services environments, including Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshot lock. When a snapshot is locked, it can't be deleted by any user and remains fully accessible for use. Additionally, snapshot lock allows users to store snapshots in WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) format for a specified duration.
These new Barman features, generally available later this week, enable enterprises and government agencies to meet cyber insurance and regulatory requirements that specify the need for secure, tamper-proof data storage.
Rubrik partner solution
We are also excited to announce a new partnership with Rubrik to enable immutable backup support, integrating Rubrik with EDB Postgres AI, including both EDB Postgres Advanced Server (EPAS) and EDB Postgres Extended Server (PGE) distributions. This enables enterprises and public sector agencies to leverage the Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) data protection solution to further streamline and enhance database backups with rapid recovery, ease of use, and self-service access across both on-premises and cloud environments.
With EPAS and PGE backup and recovery workflows seamlessly integrated in RSC, users can benefit from immutable Postgres database backups that prevent unauthorized deletion, safeguarding against ransomware attacks that target backup files to disrupt recovery efforts.
Refer to the Rubrik Partner Page for more details.
Figure 2 - Demonstration of EDB’s new backup and recovery solutions.
Improved reliability and operations for distributed HA clusters
EDB Postgres AI leads the way for applications that require high availability for critical business continuity. With EDB Postgres Distributed (PGD), customers can build geo-distributed architectures that ensure continuous availability, improve performance by placing data closer to users, and enable safe, zero-downtime software deployments.
The latest version, PGD 5.7.0, is now generally available. It delivers up to 99.999% availability with improved reliability and streamlined operations through enhanced integration with third party change data capture (CDC) functionality. This allows seamless failover of logical slots for common CDC plugins like test_decoding and pgoutput, eliminating the need for third party subscribers to reseed tables during lead primary changes and ensuring continuous data replication.
Additionally, the new Assess command in the PGD CLI ensures seamless migrations to PGD. The tool proactively identifies PostgreSQL incompatibilities before upgrades, especially those impacting logical replication, so you can address them before upgrading to PGD.
PGD 5.7.0 also introduces the pgd node upgrade command, which enables upgrades to the latest versions of PGD and PostgreSQL with a single command, limiting the manual work required for maintenance and reducing complexity and potential errors. These updates collectively enhance the robustness and usability of PGD to provide users with a more reliable and efficient data management experience.
Learn more about how PGD enables high availability for enterprise applications.
Stronger business continuity with automated failover
Minimizing Postgres downtime and service interruptions is essential for enterprises to protect against revenue loss, operational disruptions, and poor user experiences. EDB Postgres AI addresses these challenges with EDB Failover Manager (EFM), delivering management of PostgreSQL Streaming Replication to maintain high availability. It does this by orchestrating failover sequences automatically, which is crucial for minimizing downtime in production environments.
EFM 5.0, generally available on March 28, further enhances database cluster management by enabling users to seamlessly clone a standby from a primary node. This allows enterprises and government agencies to streamline high availability and reduce operational complexity in environments where Postgres failover assurance is essential to business continuity.
Learn more about EFM.
EDB Postgres AI compliance on Iron Bank
Earlier in Q1, EDB Postgres AI released EPAS 17 to Platform One’s Iron Bank, a Department of Defense (DoD) sponsored initiative. The Iron Bank is a publicly available, centralized repository where container images are built, scanned, and distributed per DoD container hardening specifications.
We’re excited to share that EDB’s Kubernetes operator, EDB CloudNativePG Cluster and the associated EPAS 16 and 17 operands have reached passing marks according to the Iron Bank’s Overall Risk Assessment Score, making EDB's Kubernetes solution the only enterprise-level relational database management system for both operator and operand in the Iron Bank.
EDB's Kubernetes solution is the only enterprise-level relational database management system for both operator and operand in the Iron Bank.
This milestone extends EDB’s Zero Trust Framework readiness, bolstering the security and compliance capabilities we offer to our customers. Interested customers can access our operator and operand by going to the Iron Bank website and creating an account for free.
That’s a wrap!
These new enhancements to EDB Postgres AI deliver on our promise to streamline operations for customers as they build and maintain robust, scalable, and secure Postgres environments. To learn about these features of our sovereign data and AI platform and how we deliver value for your business, explore EDB Postgres AI.