Citus Blog

On the Citus open source team, we engineers take an active role in helping our users scale out their Postgres database, be it for migrating an existing application or building a new application from scratch. This means we help you with distributing your relational data model—and also with getting the most out of Postgres.

One problem I often see users struggle with when it comes to Postgres is locks. While Postgres is amazing at running multiple operations at the same time, there are a few cases in which Postgres needs to block an operation using a lock. You therefore have to be careful about which locks your transactions take, but with the high-level abstractions that PostgreSQL provides, it can be difficult to know exactly what will happen. This post aims to demystify the locking behaviors in Postgres, and to give advice on how to avoid common problems.

Keep reading