Introduction
Getting the most out of your database requires developing a data access layer. The alternative solution is to use a database proxy. The Heimdall Database Proxy for Tanzu Data provides a seamless solution to manage front end connections without any application changes. We are database vendor neutral (e.g. Greenplum, Postgres, MySQL) and grid-cache vendor-neutral (e.g. GemFire, Valkey). You can improve database performance and security in minutes.
Key Benefits
- Connection Pooling: Reduce the number of front side to backend connections, saving database resources.
- Security: Privileged Access Management (PAM) for databases by ensuring authentication and authorization are centralized to your company’s LDAP/Active Directory.
- Query Caching: Improve database scale and achieve faster response times.
- Workload Management: When Greenplum is used for both transactional and analytical workloads, a proxy prioritize different connection and performance requirements.
- Load Balancing: Intelligently distribute connections across read replicas, preventing any single instance from becoming overloaded or as a single point of failure.
- High Availability: Automated Greenplum, Master write failover
Proxy Features
Connection Pooling
The Heimdall Proxy intelligently manages connections to the database to reduce the overhead. New connections leverage already established connections to the database to avoid excess connection set-up and tear-down. Additionally, only active connections (see above green) are connected to the database. Idle connections (red) are ignored.
Security
Databases do not work well with LDAP/Active Directory. Hence, DBAs need to separately manage user roles on the database. Managing multiple credentials results in security risk and extensive resources. The Heimdall Database Access Gateway enforces your Active Directory policies for database users. Privileged escalations, Just-in-time provisioning and “one-click” reports of users with database access helps fulfill SOX, SOC 2, & FINRA compliance, and meets SoD governance requirements.
Additionally, Greenplum customers have used our rate limiting and data masking features to isolate multi-tenant users for quality of service and data leakage prevention.
Query Caching
If your application generates a lot of duplicate, repetitive queries, query caching will be very beneficial. We provide the caching and invalidation logic to the cache of your choice (e.g. GemFire, Valley, Redis). Every time we see the same query, the proxy will retrieve the SQL results from cache. Implement a SQL results cache layer in minutes. No application or database code changes required.
Workload Management
The ability to set execution time limits is useful for Tanzu Data users with dynamic workloads. This feature helps to balance performance and user satisfaction by preventing long-running queries, such as analytics queries on Greenplum from delaying other operations. Additionally, our user-friendly rule engine allows these limits to be precisely configured for specific users or workload types.
Conclusion
Implementing a database requires a data access layer for applications to interface. Why build when you can use an off-the-shelf proxy? The Heimdall Proxy was a purpose built for Tanzu Data products to improve security and performance without code changes. Download a free trial.