For years, enterprises have maintained separate systems for processing transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) data, even if that meant moving data between them. However, the rise of autonomous agents and AI applications needing immediate access to data while generating volumes of operational data themselves, has exposed the cost and complexity of maintaining those separate systems.
The industry’s response has been quick, with data warehouse and database vendors proposing a wave of competing approaches to collapsing those data silos. In the past few weeks Databricks unveiled LTAP and EDB introduced converged analytics, while late last year Snowflake launched pg_lake, all of which offer different blueprints for bringing transactional, analytical and AI workloads closer together.
Now it’s the turn of distributed PostgreSQL provider pgEdge, which has introduced a beta version of ColdFront, a PostgreSQL-native hot-and-cold data tiering architecture that automatically moves older data into Apache Iceberg object storage while keeping PostgreSQL as the only database that applications need to interact with.
In ColdFront’s architecture, hot and cold refer to newer and older data, respectively.
