Citus Blog

Articles tagged: django

If you're building a software application that serves multiple tenants, you may have already encountered the challenges of managing and isolating tenant-specific data. That's where the django-multitenant library comes in. This library, actively used since 2017 and now downloaded more than 10K times per month, offers a simple and flexible solution for building multi-tenant Django applications.

In this blog post, we'll dive deeper into the concept of multi-tenancy and explore how Django-multitenant can help you build scalable, secure, and maintainable multi-tenant applications on top of PostgreSQL and the Citus database extension. We'll also provide a practical example of how to use Django-multitenant in a real-world scenario. So, if you're looking to simplify your multi-tenant development process, keep reading.

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This year, I was so excited about doing a workshop about optimizing Python & Django apps with Postgres superpowers for the PyCon 2020 conference.

Working with other developers on performance is something I always find amazing. So props to the Python people at Microsoft who encouraged my team to create a workshop on Postgres for PyCon 2020. Thank you to Nina Zakharenko, Dan Taylor, & Crystal Kelch.

Alas, we had to change our plans and find other ways to share the PostgreSQL workshop content that we had prepared. So I created a video on the topic of database performance for Django developers, to help teach you the PostgreSQL tips and tricks that have served me well in optimizing my Django apps. These tips are what I call "Postgres superpowers."

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When Django developer and Azure Postgres* engineer Louise Grandjonc confirmed that she could sit down with me for an interview in the days leading up to DjangoCon 2019, I jumped at the chance. Those of you who were in the room for Louise’s talk this week probably understand why. Louise explains technical topics in a way that makes sense—and she often uses unusual (and fun) examples, from crocodiles to owls, from Harry Potter to Taylor Swift.

And since I experience a bit of FOMO whenever I miss a fun developer conference like DjangoCon, I especially wanted to learn more about Louise’s DjangoCon talk: Postgres Index Types and where to find them.

Here’s an edited transcript of my interview with Louise Grandjonc of Microsoft (@louisemeta on Twitter.)

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Louise Grandjonc

Testing your Django app with Citus

Written byBy Louise Grandjonc | July 5, 2019Jul 5, 2019

Recently, I started working on the django-multitenant application. The main reason we created it was to to help django developers use citus in their app. While I was working on it, I wrote unit tests. And to be able to reproduce a customer’s production environment, I wanted the tests to use citus and not a single node postgres. If you are using citus as your production database, we encourage you to have it running in your development environment as well as your staging environments to be able to minimise the gap between dev and production. To understand better the importance of dev/prod parity, I recommend reading the Twelve-Factor app that will give you ideas to lower the chances of having last minute surprising when deploying on prod.

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Sai Krishna Srirampur

Scaling out your Django Multi-tenant App

Written byBy Sai Srirampur | November 14, 2017Nov 14, 2017

There are a number of data architectures you could use when building a multi-tenant app. Some, such as using one database per customer or one schema per customer, have trade-offs when it comes to larger scale. The other option is to build the notion of tenancy directly into the logic of your SaaS application. With django-multitenant and Citus, built-in tenancy becomes much easier to put in place for your application without having to re-invent the wheel yourself.

Our django-multitenant Python library, enables easy scale out of applications that are built on top of Django and follow a multi tenant data model. This Python library has evolved from our experience working with SaaS customers, scaling out their multi-tenant apps.

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"Thirty years ago, my older brother was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day.

We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne LaMott

When we started working on Citus, our vision was to combine the power of relational databases with the elastic scale of NoSQL. To do this, we took a different approach. Instead of building a new database from scratch, we leveraged PostgreSQL’s new extension APIs. This way, Citus would make Postgres a distributed database and integrate with the rich ecosystem of tools you already use.

When PostgreSQL is involved, executing on this vision isn’t a simple task. The PostgreSQL manual offers 3,558 pages of features built over two decades. The tools built around Postgres use and combine these features in unimaginable ways.

After our Citus open source announcement, we talked to many of you about scaling out your relational database. In every conversation, we’d hear about different Postgres features that needed to scale out of the box. We’d take notes from our meeting and add these features into an internal document. The list would keep getting longer, and longer, and longer.

Like the child writing a report on birds, the task ahead felt insurmountable. So how do you take a solid relational database and make sure that all those complex features scale? You take it bird by bird. We broke down the problem of scaling into five hundred smaller ones and started implementing these features one by one.

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