One of the nice things about working at Citus Data is that we get time and budget to work on personal growth projects. A few of us are playing with the Raspberry Pi. I recently got two Raspberry Pi 2's and installed the Raspbian distribution on 16GB SD cards.

Of course, the first thing I tried was to install CitusDB (our solution for massively scaling PostgreSQL across a cluster of commodity servers) and pg_shard and make them crunch some numbers. For this set-up, one of the Pi's acted as both master and worker node and the other one as a regular worker node. The Raspberry Pi 2 is a modest device, so I used a modest 1GB dataset from the TPC-H and ran the first query, which gave the following result:

What's astonishing about the Raspberry Pi 2 is how cost-effective it is for running CitusDB. The total investment in this set-up, including the microSD cards, was about $100. A cluster of 4-5 Pi's should be on par with a high performance desktop twice the cost.

Now, you might be wondering whether I brought down the whole cluster by taking a picture due to the Raspberry Pi 2's camera shyness. Yes, yes I did. Next time I'll place the Pi's in separate locations such that CitusDB will mask the node failure when taking pictures :).

We don't currently distribute a package for Raspbian, but contact us if you would like to try yourself.