What "pool" means in Pgpool-II?

 

Photo by Prachya Singhto

 Pgpool-II started its history as a connection pooler

The word "pool" in Pgpool-II had traditionally meant "connection pooling".  Actually the software was born as a connection pooling software in 2003. However after 18 years passed Pgpool-II is not only a connection pooling software anymore. Rather, the connection pooling feature is just one of rich features of Pgpool-II.

 More feature has been added to Pgpool-II

 In 2004 native replication feature (statement based replication) was added. In 2010 PostgreSQL's streaming replication can be managed. In 2012 Watchdog, a high availability feature for Pgpool-II itself, has been added.  Moreover automatic failover and load balancing are possible.

Now "pool" means "pool of PostgreSQL"

With all these feature now Pgpool-II is effectively a PostgreSQL cluster management software. So I decided to redefine the meaning of "pool" to be "pool of PostgreSQL servers". In this direction I have updated the intro chapter of PostgreSQL manual for the next release (Pgpool-II 4.3).

Pgpool-II manages a pool of PostgreSQL servers to achieve some features that are not available with single PostgreSQL installation.

An HTML compiled version of the chapter can be viewed here.

I hope this change gives people more appropriate view of this software.