Core Concepts
HTAP — Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing
Section titled “HTAP — Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing”ParticleDB is an HTAP database. It runs OLTP transactions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE with full ACID guarantees) and OLAP analytics (complex GROUP BY, aggregations over billions of rows) on the same data, in the same engine.
Traditional architectures require separate databases for transactions (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and analytics (ClickHouse, BigQuery) connected by ETL pipelines. ParticleDB eliminates this split:
| Traditional Stack | ParticleDB |
|---|---|
| PostgreSQL (OLTP) + ClickHouse (OLAP) + Pinecone (vectors) + Redis (cache) | One database |
| ETL pipeline with hours of lag | Real-time analytics on live data |
| 4 connection strings, 4 schemas | 1 connection string |
Transaction Modes
Section titled “Transaction Modes”ParticleDB picks the concurrency model at server start via --txn-mode:
| Mode | Behavior | When to use |
|---|---|---|
fast | No locks; commit-on-write | Bulk loads, single-writer benchmarks |
occ | Overlay + commit-time OCC validation (default) | General OLTP — safe under concurrency |
zero-copy-occ | Partition-pinned OCC; single-partition txns skip cross-partition coordination | High-throughput OLTP on partition-affine workloads (TPC-C, key-value) |
table-2pl | Exclusive table locks at first touch | Strictest serialization, simple semantics |
If you do not pass --txn-mode, the server picks occ, except when --wal-sync-mode sync is set (then table-2pl).
row-2pl and zcocc are accepted aliases for occ and zero-copy-occ respectively.
Wire Protocol Compatibility
Section titled “Wire Protocol Compatibility”ParticleDB speaks the PostgreSQL v3 wire protocol natively. Any tool, driver, or ORM that works with PostgreSQL works with ParticleDB:
psql,pgAdmin,DBeaver- JDBC, Npgsql,
psycopg2,node-postgres,sqlx - Diesel, SQLAlchemy, Prisma, GORM
No custom drivers required. Connect to port 5432 and run SQL.