PostgreSQL Data Tiering to Apache Iceberg: ColdFront Walkthrough

Tier PostgreSQL data to Apache Iceberg on S3 and keep it queryable and writable under the same table name. ColdFront walkthrough with live SQL. pgEdge ColdFront is 100% open source (PostgreSQL License) data tiering for PostgreSQL 16, 17, and 18. This walkthrough runs four demos on a local Docker stack: tiered storage, decoupled lake tables, the standalone partitioner, and a 2-node distributed cluster. There's no narration. Every step is explained on screen, so pause anywhere to read the SQL. What you'll see: - 1,000,000 rows start at 152 MB in the Postgres heap. After the archiver runs, 958,056 rows sit as Parquet files in object storage and the hot heap drops to 6624 kB. - An UPDATE on an archived row lands directly in object storage, with no rehydration and no restore job. - A lake-native table that stores 0 bytes in Postgres, used with plain INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. - 10 concurrent writers across two Postgres nodes: 0 conflicts, 0 Lakekeeper 409s, and 12 Iceberg snapshots for 12 writes. The demo uses a local S3-compatible store (SeaweedFS) in place of a cloud bucket. In production you point ColdFront at your own bucket. ColdFront is currently a beta release. 0:00 Prerequisites check and local stack setup 0:16 Tiered storage: start with the Postgres database you already have 0:37 Install ColdFront: two extensions, no migration 0:59 Archive cold partitions to Apache Iceberg on S3 1:28 Hot vs cold: query both tiers through one table name 1:43 Update cold data in place with plain SQL 2:41 Decoupled tables: data in the lake from day one 3:22 Prove it: zero Postgres heap bytes, real Parquet in S3 3:41 Adopt an existing Iceberg table (read-only by default) 4:47 Standalone partitioner: automated Postgres partitioning 5:22 Distributed: two Postgres nodes, one shared lake 5:58 Write on one node, read on the other 6:32 Concurrent writes with no conflicts 7:34 Scale compute, keep one copy of the data ColdFront's development was led by pgEdge Staff Software Engineer Jimmy Angelakos. ColdFront on GitHub: https://github.com/pgEdge/ColdFront Documentation: https://docs.pgedge.com/coldfront/ #PostgreSQL #ApacheIceberg #OpenSource #DataEngineering #Database Music attribution: "Basic Implosion" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/