Citus Blog

The topic of this month's PGSQL Phriday #011 community blogging event is partitioning vs. sharding in PostgreSQL. It seemed right to share a perspective on the question of "partitioning vs. sharding" from someone in the Citus open source team, since we eat, sleep, and breathe sharding for Postgres.

Postgres built-in "native" partitioning—and sharding via PG extensions like Citus—are both tools to grow your Postgres database, scale your application, and improve your application's performance.

What is partitioning and what is sharding? In Postgres, database partitioning and sharding are techniques for splitting collections of data into smaller sets, so the database only needs to process smaller chunks of data at a time. And as you might imagine, work gets done faster when you're processing less data.

In this post, you'll learn what partitioning and sharding are, why they matter, and when to use them. The table of contents:

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