Citus Blog

Materialized views were a long awaited feature within Postgres for a number of years. They finally arrived in Postgres 9.3, though at the time were limited. In Postgres 9.3 when you refreshed materialized views it would hold a lock on the table while they were being refreshed. If your workload was extremely business hours based this could work, but if you were powering something to end-users this was a deal breaker. In Postgres 9.4 we saw Postgres achieve the ability to refresh materialized views concurrently. With this we now have fully baked materialized view support, but even still we've seen they may not always be the right approach.

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Today, we’re excited to announce that we have donated 1% of Citus Data’s stock to the non-profit PostgreSQL organizations in the US and Europe. The United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS) has received this stock grant. PgUS will work with PostgreSQL Europe to support the growth, education, and future innovation of Postgres both in the US and Europe.

To our knowledge, this is the first time a company has donated 1% of its equity to support the mission of an open source foundation.

To coincide with this donation, we’re also joining the Pledge 1% movement, alongside well-known technology organizations such as Atlassian, Twilio, Box, and more.

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At Citus whether it's looking at our own data or helping a customer debug a query I end up writing a lot of SQL. When I do write SQL I do my best to make sure it's readable in case others need to come along and understand or modify, but admittedly I do have some bad habits from time to time such as using implicit joins. Regardless of my bad habits I still try to make my SQL and database as easy to understand for someone not already familiar with it. One of the biggest tools for that is comments.

Even early on in learning to program we take advantage of comments to explain and describe what our code is doing, even in times when it seems obvious. I see this less commonly in SQL and databases, which is a shame because data is just as valuable so making it easier to reason and work with seems logical. Postgres has a few great mechanisms you can start leveraging when it comes to commenting so you can better document things.

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