We Rewrote WAL-G for Postgres Backups in Rust: Meet WAL-RUS
The ClickHouse team rewrote WAL-G, a backup and recovery tool for PostgreSQL, in Rust, resulting in a new project called WAL-RUS. The rewrite aims to improve performance, reliability, and ease of deployment compared to the original Go-based implementation.
Background
- WAL-G is a widely used open-source tool (originally written in Go) for making physical backups of PostgreSQL databases, especially WAL (Write-Ahead Log) archiving, which is critical for point-in-time recovery.
- "WAL-RUS" is a Rust reimplementation of WAL-G announced by ClickHouse (a real-time analytics database company). Rewriting infrastructure tools in Rust is a common industry trend (e.g., ripgrep, fd, delta-rs) for gaining performance, safety, or cross-platform portability.
- The piece is a technical blog post from ClickHouse, which operates ClickHouse Cloud and also runs managed Postgres services, so improving backup tooling directly benefits their infrastructure and customers.