At its Google I/O conference, Google announced a new database service that it hopes will free customers of their legacy database systems. AlloyDB for PostgreSQL is a fully-managed database service compatible with PostgreSQL. 

“Databases are increasingly shifting into the cloud and we expect this trend to continue as more companies digitally transform their businesses. With AlloyDB, Google Cloud offers large enterprises a big leap forward, helping companies to have all the advantages of PostgreSQL, with the promise of improved speed and functionality, and predictable and transparent pricing,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president of data management software at IDC. 

According to Google, when compared to a standard PostgreSQL database, AlloyDB was four times faster for transactional workloads and up to 100 times faster for analytical queries. It was also twice as fast as Amazon’s comparable service. 

According to Google, what makes AlloyDB so powerful is that it “disaggregates compute and storage at every layer of the stack.” This makes it able to scale while performing in a predictable way while doing so. 

It also uses the same infrastructure building blocks that Google uses for YouTube, Search, Maps, and Gmail. 

To put customer’s minds at ease when it comes to costs, it provides transparent and predictable pricing; Customers are only charged for what they use. 

This is not the first offering Google has provided to help its customers transition from legacy systems. It also offers Oracle-to-PostgreSQL schema conversion and a Database Migration Program.

“As businesses modernize their tech stack, they are increasingly shifting to cloud databases to make their data more easily accessible and agile. AlloyDB now offers a new level of speed, scalability, and reliability that will change the way customers use cloud databases to power their applications,” said Amit Sharma, CEO of CData.