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Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW)

An extension enabling external data sources to be queried and written to using normal SQL

A Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) is a PostgreSQL extension enabling external data sources to be queried and written to using normal SQL. External data sources can be anything which provides access to some kind of data, including other databases (both PostgreSQL and other database engines), flat files, websites with data APIs, source code repositories and many other possibilities.

PostgreSQL provides two foreign data wrappers as contrib modules:

  • postgres_fdw - enables read/write connections to other PostgreSQL databases
  • file_fdw - enables reading from flat files

A large number of third-party foreign data wrappers are also available.

Implementation

A foreign data wrapper is implemented as an extension which provides an interface between PostgreSQL and the external data source. The data source itself is defined by creating a foreign server containing connection details and other options for the remote data source. Foreign tables can then be created, defining the remote data in terms of PostgreSQL relations.

The PostgreSQL planner will then, when encountering queries which reference foreign tables, hand off the appropriate parts of the query to the respective foreign data wrapper.

History

Initial implementation of foreign data wrapper support commenced in PostgreSQL 8.4 with the addtion of support for some elements of the SQL/MED standard, though no user-accessible functionality became available until PostgreSQL 9.1.

The following list provides an overview of significant foreign data wrapper functionality added in PostgreSQL 9.1 and later; see the release notes for each PostgreSQL version for full details.

Categories

Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW), PostgreSQL concept

See also

CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER, CREATE SERVER, file_fdw, postgres_fdw, SQL/MED