Open source PostgreSQL on steroids: Swarm64 database acceleration software for performance improvement and analytics

Take the 4th most popular database in the world. Make it run 20 times faster, lower costs by 70%, use it for analytics, time series, and data warehousing workloads. This is what Swarm64 database acceleration software promises
PostgreSQL is a big deal. The most common SQL open source database that you have never heard of, as ZDNet’s own Tony Baer called it. Besides being the framework on which a number of commercial offerings were built, PostgreSQL has a user base of its own. According to DB Engines, PostgreSQL is the 4th most popular database in the world.
Swarm64, on the other hand, is a small vendor. So small, actually, that we have shared the stage with CEO Thomas Richter in a local Berlin Meetup a few years back. Back then, Richter was not CEO, and Swarm64 was even smaller. But its value proposition still sounded attractive: boost PostgreSQL’s performance for free. Swarm64 is an acceleration layer for PostgreSQL.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch of course, so the “for free” part is a figure of speech. Swarm64 is a commercial vendor. Until recently, however, the real gotcha was hardware: Swarm64 Database Acceleration (DA) required a specialized chip called FPGA to be able to do its PostgreSQL magic. With Swarm64 DA 4.0 released today, that’s no longer the case.
First, a little bit of history. Why choose to accelerate PostgreSQL? Certainly, an open source database makes sense for many reasons, and PostgreSQL is popular. So to make it more concrete: why not MySQL, PostgreSQL’s rival, which is even more popular?