pgEdge, a leading open source enterprise Postgres company, is launching pgEdge ColdFront, a transparent data tiering solution for PostgreSQL.
Unlike other alternatives, ColdFront’s cold tier is fully writable: UPDATE and DELETE work on archived rows through the same SQL the application already uses, with no code changes and no rehydration required, according to the company.
Older data moves automatically to Apache Iceberg in Parquet format on any S3-compatible object store at a lower storage cost. Meanwhile, the complete dataset stays readable and writable through a single Postgres table name, and cold-tier scans operate at analytical speed thanks to the DuckDB vectorized columnar engine, the company said.
A simple yet problematic example demonstrates the power and convenience of ColdFront: a GDPR deletion request against five-year-old archived data. With ColdFront this is a single SQL statement—not a restore-to-hot, delete, re-archive, and re-verify cycle. The cold tier is writable by default.
“For years vendors have been claiming they’ve seamlessly united analytical, transactional and now AI workloads. ColdFront finally delivers for Postgres, without trade-offs and without proprietary vendor lock-in,” said Phillip Merrick, CPO of pgEdge. “ColdFront eliminates the trade-offs entirely. The application keeps the same SQL. DuckDB runs in-process for analytical speed on cold data. The cold tier is writable. And it runs on standard unpatched PostgreSQL, so no migrations are required to deploy it.”
Benefits and features include:
- SaaS and IoT time-series workloads. Applications generating millions of events per day keep the recent working set in PostgreSQL for dashboard and alerting queries. The archiver automatically moves older partitions to Iceberg.
- Regulated industries with long retention mandates. Financial services, healthcare and government teams with 7-10 year retention requirements store cold data in Apache Iceberg, an open vendor-neutral format that remains readable by any Iceberg-capable tool regardless of future vendor decisions. Compliance queries and deletion requests run through the same SQL interface.
- Analytics without a dedicated data warehouse. Product and BI teams run aggregations, cohort analysis, and trend queries over cold Parquet data using DuckDB’s columnar engine running in-process inside PostgreSQL. No more massive data warehouse vendor bills and no ETL pipeline, no CDC, no separate analytics system to build or maintain.
“Database teams are paying SSD prices for data they almost never touch, while spending real engineering time managing what to keep, what to delete, and how to recover old data when the business needs it,” said Dave Page, CTO of pgEdge. “ColdFront handles the full lifecycle automatically. The application keeps using the same SQL and the storage bill drops by up to 90%. We validated it at 4.4M rows per second across a 6-node cluster with 60 million rows. That is what production actually looks like.”
pgEdge ColdFront is available now as a beta release for pre-production testing and evaluation. Both tiered and decoupled modes work end-to-end across a fully green CI matrix covering PostgreSQL 16, 17 and 18 in vanilla and multi-master Spock mesh topologies, including physical standby reads. Storage types supported include S3-compatible, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage (ADLS Gen2).
ColdFront will be bundled with pgEdge Enterprise Postgres and integrated into pgEdge Cloud within H2 2026.
For more information about this news, visit www.pgedge.com.