Citus Blog

In one of our recent releases of the open source Citus extension, we overhauled the way Citus executes distributed SQL queries—with the net effect being some huge improvements in terms of performance, user experience, Postgres compatibility, and resource management. The Citus executor is now able to dynamically adapt to the type of distributed SQL query, ensuring fast response times both for quick index lookups and big analytical queries.

We call this new Citus feature the “adaptive executor” and we thought it would be useful to walk through what the Citus adaptive executor means for Postgres and how it works.

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The last two months, I managed the agenda for our weekly Citus team meeting, the one time each week where our entire distributed team—with people spread across 6 different countries—gets together to talk about Citus things. As I chatted with our PostgreSQL folks to find speakers to give 10-minute “lightning talks”, I heard a chorus from several of the engineers: “see if you can get Joe to give a talk. His talks are always super interesting.”

I succeeded. Joe Nelson (known as begriffs online) did deliver a talk titled “Dominus SQL, lord of my domain.” And the engineers liked it. Not a surprise, as Joe’s content tends to be pretty popular, both on his personal blog, and on the Citus Data blog, including high traffic posts such as 5 ways to paginate in Postgres and Faster PostgreSQL Counting.

And when Joe agreed to let me interview him about his work on the Citus documentation (he’s quite busy so I wasn’t sure he would say yes), well, I was thrilled. This post is an edited transcript of my interview with Joe—and it’s your inside baseball view into how the documentation for the Citus open source project gets made.

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