The new version of dotConnect for PostgreSQL offers support for load balancing. It allows specifying multiple hosts with their ports in the Host parameter of the connection string. The servers should be separated by commas.
Load Balancing Support
PostgreSQL cluster can use continuous archiving and continuous recovery (Hot Standby mode) for high availability and load balancing. In this mode, there is one primary server, accepting both read/write and read-only commands, and standby servers that accept only read-only commands.
dotConnect for PostgreSQL can automatically detect which server from the list is primary, and which are standby, and direct read/write commands against the primary server and switch servers for each read-only command using round-robin load balancing.
You can control the behavior of dotConnect for PostgreSQL in how it selects between primary and standby servers, using the new Target Session connection string parameter. For more details, you can read the Load Balancing article in our documentation.
Keep Connected Parameter
In addition to load balancing support, we have added a new Keep Connected connection string parameter. It allows you to configure a connection to send ping calls to PostgreSQL periodically when a connection is idle and trigger the StateChanged event if a call fails. This allows you to avoid PostgreSQL closing connections because of inactivity and to know if the connection is still valid when keeping idle connections for long periods.
Entity Framework 5 Updates
dotConnect for PostgreSQL now includes new assemblies for Entity Framework 5, compiled with .NET Framework 4.7. They are the following assemblies: Devart.Data.PostgreSql.Entity.EF5.dll, Devart.Data.PostgreSql.Entity.Migrations.EF5.dll, Devart.Data.PostgreSql.Entity.Spatials.EF5.dll. These assemblies can be found in the \Entity\EF5\net47\ subfolder of dotConnect for the PostgreSQL installation folder. Entity Developer now uses them by default when designing a model, targeting Entity Framework 5.
You are welcome to download the updated versions of dotConnect for PostgreSQL and send feedback.
