Frequently Asked Questions

What is Crystal DBA and what makes it unique?

Crystal DBA is an AI teammate that helps you run PostgreSQL like an expert would, even if you are not a database expert. It analyzes your database and the application running on it, generating insights and recommendations for query tuning, system reliability, and system configuration.

How does Crystal DBA work?

Crystal DBA integrates with your PostgreSQL environment in read-only mode to collect metrics and provide actionable recommendations. Your team can use its chat-based interface to ask questions like, “What indexes do I need to add?” or “How close am I to IOPS capacity?” and receive precise, AI-powered answers derived from your database’s workload.

How secure is Crystal DBA?

We offer multiple deployment models to meet any organization’s security needs. These range from our cloud offering, which is secured according to commercial best practices, to custom deployments suitable for sensitive environments including air-gapped scenarios. We developed Crystal DBA with numerous internal guardrails to ensure read-only database access, prevent processing of personally identifiable information (PII), and control user access.

Is Crystal DBA compatible with my PostgreSQL version and deployment?

Crystal DBA supports PostgreSQL versions 13 and higher under most deployment scenarios. Among cloud providers, this includes Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. On Kubernetes, we support CloudNativePG. We also support on-prem settings.

What questions can Crystal DBA answer about my database?

Crystal DBA can provide insights on query tuning and indexing, database health and performance trends, resource utilization, database parameter tuning, capacity planning and scalability. See the user guide for more information.

How much does Crystal DBA cost?

Crystal DBA offers multiple plans at different price points. You can use the free plan for $0/month with no credit card. The full-featured team plan costs $200 per month for each production server, with discounts for replicas. Development environments remain free. At the enterprise level, we offer tailored solutions with custom pricing. See the pricing for more information.

How do I choose the right plan?

The Crystal DBA free individual plan is ideal for engineers and small teams needing analysis of the current state of their database on an ad hoc basis. Our team plan adds advanced analysis, multi-database monitoring, and team collaboration tools. The enterprise plan includes custom optimization, replication management, custom installations, and 24x7 support. See our pricing for more information.

Does Crystal DBA make changes to my database?

No, Crystal DBA only can read your database and it cannot make changes. It can provide detailed guidance, but you will need to apply any changes in accordance with your organization’s change management procedures.

What if I have multiple PostgreSQL databases?

Whether you have micro-services architecture, a multi-tenant architecture, or support many databases for another reason, Crystal DBA is your go-to tool. We want you to use Crystal DBA for all your PostgreSQL databases, and designed our product and pricing plans to make it easy to do so.

Is Crystal DBA open-source?

The components of Crystal DBA that you install on your machines are open-source, including the command-line interface (CLI) client and data collector. The back-end components and AI systems are not available as open source at this time.

How can my team collaborate with Crystal DBA?

Starting with the Team plan, Crystal DBA can join your Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace, where you can set up private or public channels to receive AI-initiated database reports. Your team can collaborate in group chats to discuss solutions or direct message Crystal DBA for one-on-one database expertise, making it easy to access real-time insights within your existing workflows.

What advanced features are included in the Enterprise Plan?

The Enterprise Plan includes cost optimization recommendations, replication management, and custom installations for multi-cloud and on-premise setups. It also provides SOC2-compliant environments and 24x7 support via email, chat, and phone.

Does Crystal DBA use my data to train its AI models?

Unless explicitly authorized to do so, we will not use any information about your system to our models. However, you may opt-in to providing data for us to use in improving Crystal DBA’s recommendations, which can include model evaluation and training.

Does Crystal DBA send my data to OpenAI or other LLMs?

Yes, we do use 3rd party LLMs to process your requests. The terms of our agreements with LLM providers prohibit use of Crystal DBA data for training. Enterprise customers may choose to use LLMs hosted by their cloud provider on dedicated servers.

How can I install Crystal DBA?

The easiest way to get started with Crystal DBA is to install the free command-line interface. You can use this to connect to your database much as you would using psql or other console tools. To gain access to monitoring features, historical metrics, and team collaboration you need to install the collector agent. For custom deployments we recommend using Kubernetes, but various forms are possible.

What hardware do I need to run Crystal DBA on-prem?

Running a self-hosted Crystal DBA back-end requires a data service and an LLM service. For the data service, we recommend using a server with at least 32 GB of memory and 4 CPU cores. Such a configuration is typically adequate for up to 10 databases with typical activity levels. If you choose to self-host the LLMs we recommend using dual Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs or similar hardware.

Does Crystal DBA only work with PostgreSQL?

Crystal DBA only works with PostgreSQL today. We are open supporting other databases in the future based on demand.