Electric 1.1: new storage engine with 100x faster writes
Ilia Borovitinov
A behind‑the‑scenes look at Electric's new storage engine: why we built it, how it works, and how it improves performance in production.
Postgres Sync
Sync from your database into your apps. For partial replication, data delivery and fan-out.
Electric 1.0 release
Electric is now 1.0! See the release post here.
Electric sync engine
The Electric sync engine syncs little subsets of data out of Postgres into local apps and services — wherever you need the data.
You can sync data into:
- web and mobile apps, replacing data fetching with data sync
- edge workers and services, for example maintaining a low-latency edge data cache
- local AI systems, for example running RAG using pgvector
- dev and test environments, for example syncing data into an embedded PGlite database
How does it work?
The Electric sync engine is an Elixir application, developed at packages/sync-service.
It connects to your Postgres using a DATABASE_URL, consumes the logical replication stream and fans out data into Shapes, which Clients then consume and sync.
This enables a massive number of clients to query and get real-time updates to subsets of the database. In this way, Electric turns Postgres into a real-time database.
Related posts
More information
See how you can combine Postgres Sync with other Electric products to build fast, reactive apps.
See the Docs, Quickstart and Demos. You can self-host or use the Electric Cloud.