FEMEBE (Front-End, Middle-End, Back-End) is a library for introspection and manipulation of the [PostgreSQL wire protocol] (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/protocol.html), colloquially known as FEBE (Front-End/Back-End).
The library is in development and breaking changes to its API will still happen.
FEMEBE works with all currently-supported Postgres versions.
The Postgres protocol abstracts the low-level TCP communication between a client and server into a bidrectional stream of sequential, synchronous messages.
FEMEBE provides an interface to that abstraction, so any Go tool that needs to hook into the protocol can build against a normal package API rather than having to parse the raw protocol at the TCP level.
There are five basic ways to use FEMEBE:
- Stub out or implement a Postgres client (the former is probably more sensibly done by actually being a client--e.g., using pq--but this may be useful for more esoteric use cases).
- Stub out or implement (!) a Postges-compatible server
- Postgres switchboard (route connections and then step out of the way)
- Listen to the protocol (e.g., a protocol traffic viewer)
- Manipulate the protocol (e.g., dynamically enrich query results with data from other sources)
FEMEBE can use help in a number of areas:
- Bug reports, especially with minimal, reproducible test cases
- Performance benchmarks and improvements
- API improvements so we can confidently freeze the interface,
especially for:
- Composable (but still performant and simple)
Routers - Custom error types rather than blind propagation
- Composable (but still performant and simple)
- Add server TLS support (TLS for the client piece exists)
- Support parsing and formatting remaining message types
- Utility functions for data type management
- Documentation (especially sample code)
- Other ideas
To contribute, please open an issue.