Connect Crunchy Bridge to Excel, Sheets and AI

Two ports, one hostname, and nothing to get out of step

Most managed Postgres services with a pooler hand you a second hostname, or a flag you have to remember. Crunchy Bridge changes the port and nothing else, which turns out to matter more than it sounds.

• Port 5432 is the direct database. Port 5431 is the built-in PgBouncer, running in transaction mode, on the same host with the same credentials.
• Because the port is part of every connection string, it travels with the paste. Paste a 5431 URI and the card switches itself to pooled — you do not have to know that the mode selector exists.
• The agent reads the same port when it connects, so what the badge shows and what actually happens are the same fact rather than two settings that can drift apart. On cards where the pooled flag is stored separately from the address, they can.
• The mode selector will not let you contradict yourself. Choose the pool with the port still on 5432 and it says so before you can save, which is the failure this design is built to prevent.

What changes when you go through the pool

Transaction pooling hands your session to a different backend between statements, and two Npgsql defaults have to move for that to be safe.

• Prepared statements are switched off. Named prepared statements do not survive being reassigned to another backend, so automatic preparation is pinned off rather than left to fail later under load.
• The session reset that normally runs when a connection returns to the pool is skipped, because on a transaction pooler that reset is not yours to perform.
• Both are applied by the agent from the port alone. There is nothing to configure and no way to have the pooled endpoint without the pooled behaviour.
• Use the direct port for long-running reads and the pool when you have many short ones. Either works from Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets; the difference shows up under concurrency, not in the results.

Encrypted, and what that does and does not prove

Worth stating plainly, because it is the same posture across every managed Postgres card here and it is easy to over-read.

• TLS is required, not offered. The agent forces encryption for Crunchy hostnames even if the SSL checkbox is cleared, so the traffic is never in the clear.
• The certificate chain is not verified. Treat it as protection against anyone reading the traffic in transit, rather than as proof of which server answered.
• Everything the agent runs is read-only, and the credentials never leave the machine you installed it on. Query Streams stores no copy of your data and no copy of your password.
• Nothing needs installing at the Crunchy end. The agent carries the Npgsql driver and connects as an ordinary client.

-- Ordinary Postgres, read-only, over TLS
SELECT   c.name,
         COUNT(o.id)   AS orders,
         SUM(o.amount) AS revenue
FROM     public.customers AS c
JOIN     public.orders    AS o ON o.customer_id = c.id
WHERE    o.placed_at >= now() - interval '30 days'
GROUP BY c.name
ORDER BY revenue DESC;