Postgres

This page guides you through the process of setting up the Postgres destination connector.

caution

Postgres, while an excellent relational database, is not a data warehouse. Postgres is likely to perform poorly with large data volumes. Even postgres-compatible destinations (e.g. AWS Aurora) are not immune to slowdowns when dealing with large writes or updates over ~500GB. Especially when using normalization with destination-postgres, be sure to monitor your database's memory and CPU usage during your syncs. It is possible for your destination to 'lock up', and incur high usage costs with large sync volumes.

Prerequisites

To use the Postgres destination, you'll need:

• A Postgres server version 9.5 or above

Airbyte Cloud only supports connecting to your Postgres instances with SSL or TLS encryption. TLS is used by default. Other than that, you can proceed with the open-source instructions below.

You'll need the following information to configure the Postgres destination:

• Host - The host name of the server.
• Port - The port number the server is listening on. Defaults to the PostgreSQL™ standard port number (5432).
• Username
• Password
• Default Schema Name - Specify the schema (or several schemas separated by commas) to be set in the search-path. These schemas will be used to resolve unqualified object names used in statements executed over this connection.
• Database - The database name. The default is to connect to a database with the same name as the user name.
• JDBC URL Params (optional)

Refer to this guide for more details

Configure Network Access

Make sure your Postgres database can be accessed by Airbyte. If your database is within a VPC, you may need to allow access from the IP you're using to expose Airbyte.

Step 1: Set up Postgres

Permissions

You need a Postgres user with the following permissions:

• can create tables and write rows.
• can create schemas e.g:

You can create such a user by running:

CREATE USER airbyte_user WITH PASSWORD '<password>';
GRANT CREATE, TEMPORARY ON DATABASE <database> TO airbyte_user;

You can also use a pre-existing user but we highly recommend creating a dedicated user for Airbyte.

Step 2: Set up the Postgres connector in Airbyte

Target Database

You will need to choose an existing database or create a new database that will be used to store synced data from Airbyte.

Naming Conventions

From Postgres SQL Identifiers syntax:

• SQL identifiers and key words must begin with a letter (a-z, but also letters with diacritical marks and non-Latin letters) or an underscore (_).

• Subsequent characters in an identifier or key word can be letters, underscores, digits (0-9), or dollar signs ($).

  Note that dollar signs are not allowed in identifiers according to the SQL standard, so their use might render applications less portable. The SQL standard will not define a key word that contains digits or starts or ends with an underscore, so identifiers of this form are safe against possible conflict with future extensions of the standard.

• The system uses no more than NAMEDATALEN-1 bytes of an identifier; longer names can be written in commands, but they will be truncated. By default, NAMEDATALEN is 64 so the maximum identifier length is 63 bytes

• Quoted identifiers can contain any character, except the character with code zero. (To include a double quote, write two double quotes.) This allows constructing table or column names that would otherwise not be possible, such as ones containing spaces or ampersands. The length limitation still applies.

• Quoting an identifier also makes it case-sensitive, whereas unquoted names are always folded to lower case.

• In order to make your applications portable and less error-prone, use consistent quoting with each name (either always quote it or never quote it).

Note, that Airbyte Postgres destination will create tables and schemas using the Unquoted identifiers when possible or fallback to Quoted Identifiers if the names are containing special characters.

For Airbyte Cloud:

1. Log into your Airbyte Cloud account.

2. In the left navigation bar, click Destinations. In the top-right corner, click new destination.

3. On the Set up the destination page, enter the name for the Postgres connector and select Postgres from the Destination type dropdown.

4. Enter a name for your source.

5. For the Host, Port, and DB Name, enter the hostname, port number, and name for your Postgres database.

6. List the Default Schemas.

   note

   The schema names are case sensitive. The 'public' schema is set by default. Multiple schemas may be used at one time. No schemas set explicitly - will sync all of existing.

7. For User and Password, enter the username and password you created in Step 1.

8. For Airbyte Open Source, toggle the switch to connect using SSL. For Airbyte Cloud uses SSL by default.

9. For SSL Modes, select:

   • disable to disable encrypted communication between Airbyte and the source
   • allow to enable encrypted communication only when required by the source
   • prefer to allow unencrypted communication only when the source doesn't support encryption
   • require to always require encryption. Note: The connection will fail if the source doesn't support encryption.
   • verify-ca to always require encryption and verify that the source has a valid SSL certificate
   • verify-full to always require encryption and verify the identity of the source

10. To customize the JDBC connection beyond common options, specify additional supported JDBC URL parameters as key-value pairs separated by the symbol & in the JDBC URL Parameters (Advanced) field.

    Example: key1=value1&key2=value2&key3=value3

    These parameters will be added at the end of the JDBC URL that the AirByte will use to connect to your Postgres database.

    The connector now supports connectTimeout and defaults to 60 seconds. Setting connectTimeout to 0 seconds will set the timeout to the longest time available.

    Note: Do not use the following keys in JDBC URL Params field as they will be overwritten by Airbyte: currentSchema, user, password, ssl, and sslmode.

    danger

    This is an advanced configuration option. Users are advised to use it with caution.

11. For SSH Tunnel Method, select:

    • No Tunnel for a direct connection to the database
    • SSH Key Authentication to use an RSA Private as your secret for establishing the SSH tunnel
    • Password Authentication to use a password as your secret for establishing the SSH tunnel
    danger

    Since Airbyte Cloud requires encrypted communication, select SSH Key Authentication or Password Authentication if you selected disable, allow, or prefer as the SSL Mode; otherwise, the connection will fail.

12. Click Set up destination.

Supported sync modes

The Postgres destination connector supports the following sync modes:

Feature	Supported?(Yes/No)	Notes
Full Refresh Sync	Yes
Incremental - Append Sync	Yes
Incremental - Append + Deduped	Yes
Namespaces	Yes

Schema map

Output Schema

Each stream will be mapped to a separate table in Postgres. Each table will contain 3 columns:

• _airbyte_ab_id: a uuid assigned by Airbyte to each event that is processed. The column type in Postgres is VARCHAR.
• _airbyte_emitted_at: a timestamp representing when the event was pulled from the data source. The column type in Postgres is TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE.
• _airbyte_data: a json blob representing with the event data. The column type in Postgres is JSONB.

Tutorials

Now that you have set up the Postgres destination connector, check out the following tutorials:

• Migrate from mysql to postgres
• Postgres replication

Changelog

Version	Date	Pull Request	Subject
0.4.0	2023-06-27	#27781	License Update: Elv2
0.3.27	2023-04-04	#24604	Support for destination checkpointing
0.3.26	2022-09-27	#17299	Improve error handling for strict-encrypt postgres destination
0.3.24	2022-09-08	#16046	Fix missing database name URL Encoding
0.3.23	2022-07-18	#16260	Prevent traffic going on an unsecured channel in strict-encryption version of destination postgres
0.3.22	2022-07-18	#13840	Added the ability to connect using different SSL modes and SSL certificates
0.3.21	2022-07-06	#14479	Publish amd64 and arm64 versions of the connector
0.3.20	2022-05-17	#12820	Improved 'check' operation performance
0.3.19	2022-04-25	#12195	Add support for additional JDBC URL Params input
0.3.18	2022-04-12	#11729	Bump mina-sshd from 2.7.0 to 2.8.0
0.3.17	2022-04-05	#11729	Fixed bug with dashes in schema name
0.3.15	2022-02-25	#10421	Refactor JDBC parameters handling
0.3.14	2022-02-14	#10256	(unpublished) Add -XX:+ExitOnOutOfMemoryError JVM option
0.3.13	2021-12-01	#8371	Fixed incorrect handling "\n" in ssh key
0.3.12	2021-11-08	#7719	Improve handling of wide rows by buffering records based on their byte size rather than their count
0.3.11	2021-09-07	#5743	Add SSH Tunnel support
0.3.10	2021-08-11	#5336	Destination Postgres: fix \u0000(NULL) value processing