Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler like PgBouncer, according to a survey of major providers including AWS RDS, Azure, Google Cloud SQL, Supabase, Neon, DigitalOcean, and others. Only IBM Cloud and Oracle OCI lack a managed pooling option, and both are dismissed as unlikely choices outside enterprise sales cycles. The piece argues connection pooling is effectively a mandatory add-on because Postgres itself handles many connections poorly, and contrasts this with MySQL and MongoDB, which don't require a bolted-on pooler. The wasted effort of every provider building homegrown pooling setups and every user having to learn PgBouncer's quirks (like the lack of LISTEN/NOTIFY support) is framed as evidence that native connection pooling in Postgres itself would be a high-impact improvement.

Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
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6August 16, 2026 11.6K 6