# pg_lake

18 Hacker News commenters recommended pg_lake and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-source Postgres extension for querying data lake tables alongside operational data in one database. Common caveat: it lacks some Postgres and Parquet types, and CDC is not open source.

## Why people recommend it

- Single query across operational and lake data (3 comments): "Embedding the engine in the catalog rather than the catalog in the engine enables transactions across analytical and operational tables." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814513)) "extending a postgres db to read the same data store via pglake (or duckdb + ducklake) is actually pretty slick" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193831)) "The way I see it this can now be done with a single query." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45815552))
- Analytics on big data inside Postgres (2 comments): "I love this. There are definitely shops where the data is a bit too much for postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814099)) "it's pretty insane having postgres & the power of duckdb for mega aggregation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139403))
- Team has extension experience (2 comments): "There's a degree of maturity to pg_lake resulting from our team's experience working on extensions like Citus" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45815070)) "Crunchy's Postgres extension is by far the most ahead solution in the market." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812670))
- Could simplify data stack (2 comments): "could massively simplify our data stack for a b2b saas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816346)) "this would have made my past job so much easier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45815242))

## What people warn about

- CDC missing or not open source (2 comments): "it heavily refers to but is missing CDC capabilities" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239219)) "all the CDC stuff is in the repo we don't get access to, that isn't open source" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242325))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [pgvector](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgvector.md): 55 recommend
- [PostGIS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgis.md): 20 recommend
- [ParadeDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paradedb.md): 13 recommend
- [pg_textsearch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-textsearch.md): 10 recommend
- [Tin full-text search for Postgres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tin.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "pg_lake", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-lake/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).