Citus Blog

Last month we released Citus 10 and we've received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback on the new columnar compression and single node Citus features, as well as the news that we’ve open sourced the shard rebalancer.

The new and exciting Citus 10 features are bringing in lots of new users of Citus open source and the Citus database service on Azure. And many of you are asking:

I recently gave a talk about the Citus extension to Postgres at the Warsaw PostgreSQL Users Group. Unfortunately, I did not get to go in person to beautiful Warsaw, but it was still a nice way to interact with the global Postgres community and talk about what Citus is, how it works, and what it can do for you.

A lot of people look to Citus for a solution that scales out their Postgres database, whether on-prem or as open source or in the cloud, as a fully-managed database as a service. And yet, a common question even before looking at Citus is: "what kind of performance can I get with Postgres?" The answer is: it depends. The performance you can expect from single node Postgres comes down to your workload, both on inserts and on the query side and how large that single node is. Unfortunately, "it depends" often leaves people a bit dissatisfied.

Fortunately, there are some fermi estimates, or in laymans terms ballpark, of what performance single node Postgres can deliver. These ballparks apply both to single-node Postgres, but from there you can start to get estimates of how much further you can go when scaling out with Citus. Let's walk through a simplified guide for what you should expect in terms of the read performance and ingest performance for queries in Postgres.