apitap 0.13.0

Move whole tables between databases at wire speed, in bounded memory

apitap

Move whole tables between databases at wire speed, in bounded memory.

apitap is the open-source transfer engine behind apitap cloud — a Rust core with Python bindings, in the spirit of Polars. It moves data the way the databases themselves would: raw wire-format streams, parallel range pipes, atomic swaps, and memory that stays flat no matter how big the table is.

pip install apitap

import apitap

report = apitap.transfer(
    "postgres://user:pass@src-host/db",
    "postgres://user:pass@dst-host/db",
    table="public.events",
)
print(f"{report.rows:,} rows in {report.elapsed_ms} ms over {report.parallel} pipes")

Routes

The URL schemes pick the route; each pair negotiates the fastest wire format both sides speak:

route	how it moves
postgres:// → postgres://	raw binary COPY passthrough — no row decode at all
postgres:// → clickhouse://	binary COPY transcoded in-flight to RowBinary
mysql:// → clickhouse://	binary wire protocol decoded straight into RowBinary
mysql:// → postgres://	wire decode → binary COPY (exact decimals up to DECIMAL(65,30))

Every transfer stages into <table>__apitap_staging and swaps in atomically — readers never see a partial table, an empty source never wipes a good one, and a mid-run failure leaves the previous table untouched.

How fast?

10M rows, every tool capped at 16 vCPU / 4 GB, auto settings, stock Docker databases — apitap measured from this exact published wheel (pip install apitap), every number checksum-validated across engines:

route	apitap	ingestr 1.0.75	dlt 1.x (default)	dlt + pyarrow
Postgres → Postgres	20.2 s	500 s	2 604 s	708 s
Postgres → ClickHouse	9.9 s	111 s	1 893 s	360 s
MySQL → ClickHouse	10.4 s	97 s	2 231 s	failed¹
MySQL → Postgres	22.5 s	481 s	2 899 s	failed¹
Postgres → BigQuery²	28.4 s	860 s	2 160 s	—

² Measured at 0.5.0, 8 pipes uncapped (40.3 s at 2 vCPU); the wall is upload + BigQuery-side parsing, not local CPU. 100% free-path ingestion — load and copy jobs only, no insertAll, works on sandbox (no-billing) projects. At 0.5 vCPU / 256 MB apitap moves 1M rows in 17.9 s while ingestr and dlt+pyarrow are both OOM-killed before finishing.

¹ dlt's pyarrow backend refuses MySQL DOUBLE without hand-written schema hints; its connectorx backend was OOM-killed on all four routes at the same 4 GB cap apitap runs in. Full methodology, validation queries, and honest caveats: benchmarks/README.md.

In a 0.5 vCPU / 256 MB container apitap still completes every route (28–68 s) — the pipe count auto-derives from the cgroup's CPU and memory, so it never OOM-kills itself.

API

apitap.transfer(
    src, dst, table, *,
    dest_table=None,     # defaults to `table`
    parallel=None,       # auto: CPU- and memory-aware; explicit value never overridden
    cursor=None,         # auto: integer PK; PK-less Postgres tables use TID ranges
    chunk_bytes=None,    # per-send coalescing, default 4 MiB
    durable=True,        # False = UNLOGGED staging on Postgres dests (~-30% wall,
                         # table stays unlogged until ALTER TABLE … SET LOGGED)
) -> TransferReport      # .rows, .elapsed_ms, .parallel

mode="append" loads only rows past the last synced watermark; mode="merge" (Postgres destinations) upserts the delta by the destination's primary key. The watermark lives in _apitap_state — a plain, queryable table in the destination database, one row per (table, source), written in the same transaction as the data on Postgres. No local state files, no opaque blobs, no extra columns injected into your rows: state that is backed up, restored, and debugged together with the data it describes. A 1M-row delta lands on a 10M-row table in ~10 s — cost is proportional to the delta, not the table.

The GIL is released for the whole transfer. Errors are ValueError for bad input (unknown table, unsupported type — always at probe time, never mid-copy) and RuntimeError for transfer failures.

Full usage guide — connection URLs, per-route type mappings, durability semantics, troubleshooting: docs/usage.md.

Roadmap

• Postgres → Postgres · Postgres → ClickHouse · MySQL → ClickHouse · MySQL → Postgres
• Postgres → BigQuery — dual Parquet/CSV lanes, free-path load+copy jobs, DML-free incremental state (sandbox-safe)
• Incremental sync — mode="append" / mode="merge" (transactional state table)
• ClickHouse table engines — engine=, order_by=, on_cluster=
• MySQL → BigQuery
• read_postgres() → Arrow / Polars
• Snowflake destination
• aarch64 + macOS wheels

License

MIT. Source: github.com/apitap/apitap-lib. The managed cloud (scheduling, always-on per-tenant workers, monitoring, a UI) is apitap.dev.