PgBouncer, Pgpool-II and others: A proxy for PostgreSQL 🐘

2025-10-30

A PostgreSQL proxy or connection pooler is an intermediary application that sits between your client applications and one or more PostgreSQL servers. It speaks the PostgreSQL network protocol, which allows any standard client (for example, your web server or an application in Java/Python/Go) to connect to the proxy believing it is talking directly to a PostgreSQL server.

Unlike MySQL, where proxies are often used for read/write splitting (R/W split) or caching, in the PostgreSQL world the main task of a proxy is efficient connection management.