Welcome to Odyssey¶

What is Odyssey¶

Advanced multi-threaded PostgreSQL connection pooler and request router.

Odyssey is production-ready, it is being used in large production setups. We appreciate any kind of feedback and contribution to the project.

Why Odyssey¶

Multi-threaded processing¶

Odyssey can significantly scale processing performance by specifying a number of additional worker threads. Each worker thread is responsible for authentication and proxying client-to-server and server-to-client requests. All worker threads are sharing global server connection pools. Multi-threaded design plays important role in SSL/TLS performance.

Advanced transactional pooling¶

Odyssey tracks current transaction state and in case of unexpected client disconnection can emit automatic Cancel connection and do Rollback of abandoned transaction, before putting server connection back to the server pool for reuse. Additionally, last server connection owner client is remembered to reduce a need for setting up client options on each client-to-server assignment.

Better pooling control¶

Odyssey allows to define connection pools as a pair of Database and User. Each defined pool can have separate authentication, pooling mode and limits settings.

Authentication¶

Odyssey has full-featured SSL/TLS support and common authentication methods like: md5 and clear text both for client and server authentication. Odyssey supports PAM & LDAP authentication, this methods operates similarly to clear text auth except that it uses PAM/LDAP to validate user name/password pairs. PAM optionally checks the connected remote host name or IP address. Additionally it allows to block each pool user separately.

Architecture and internals¶

Odyssey has sophisticated asynchronous multi-threaded architecture which is driven by custom made coroutine engine: machinarium. Main idea behind coroutine design is to make event-driven asynchronous applications to look and feel like being written in synchronous-procedural manner instead of using traditional callback approach.

One of the main goal was to make code base understandable for new developers and to make an architecture easily extensible for future development.

More information: Architecture and internals.