Citus Blog

Sharding is one of those database topics that most developers have a distant understanding of, but the details aren't always perfectly clear unless you've implemented sharding yourself. In building the Citus database (our extension to Postgres that shards the underlying database), we've followed a lot of the same principles you'd follow if you were manually sharding Postgres yourself. The main difference of course is that with Citus, we’ve done the heavy lifting to shard Postgres and make it easy to adopt, whereas if you were to shard at the application layer then there’s a good bit of of work needed to re-architect your application.

I've found myself explaining how sharding works to many people over the past year and realized it would be useful (and maybe even interesting) to break it down in plain English.

Citus is a distributed database that extends (not forks) PostgreSQL for large workloads. One challenge associated with building a distributed relational database (RDBMS) is that they require notable effort to deploy and operate. To remove these operational barriers, we’ve been thinking about offering Citus as a managed database for a while now.

Naturally, we were also worried that providing a native database offering on AWS could split our startup’s focus and take up significant engineering resources. (Honestly, if the founding engineers of the Heroku Postgres team didn’t join Citus, we might have decided to wait on this.) After having Citus Cloud publicly available for eight months though, we are now more bullish on the cloud then ever.

It turns out that targeting an important use case for your customers and delivering it to them in a way that removes their pain points, matters more than anything else. In this blog post, we’ll only focus on removing operational pain points and not on use cases: Why is cloud changing the way databases are delivered to customers? What AWS technologies Citus Cloud is using to enable that in a unique way?

Today we’re happy to announce our new activerecord-multi-tenant Ruby library, which enables easy scale-out of applications that are built on top of Ruby on Rails and follow a multi-tenant data model.

This Ruby library has evolved from our experience working with customers, scaling out their multi-tenant apps, and patching some restrictions that ActiveRecord and Rails currently have when it comes to automatic query building. It is based on the excellent acts_as_tenant library, and extends it for the particular use-case of a distributed multi-tenant database like Citus.

Relational databases are the first choice of data store for many applications due to their enormous flexibility and reliability. Historically the one knock against relational databases is that they can only run on a single machine, which creates inherent...

If you’re building a SaaS application, you probably already have the notion of tenancy built in your data model. Typically, most information relates to tenants / customers / accounts and your database tables capture this natural relation.

With smaller amounts of data (10s of GB), it’s easy to throw more hardware at the problem and scale up your database. As these tables grow however, you need to think about ways to scale your multi-tenant database across dozens or hundreds of machines.

After our blog post on sharding a multi-tenant app with Postgres, we received a number of questions on architectural patterns for multi-tenant databases and when to use which. At a high level, developers have three options:

Product search is a common, yet sometimes challenging use-case for online retailers and marketplaces. It typically involves a combination of full-text search and filtering by attributes which differ for every product category. More complex use-cases may have many sellers that offer the same product, but with a different price and different properties.

This blog post simplifies certain concepts to be brief. If you're looking for examples on how to override the PostgreSQL planner and executor, please check out Citus on GitHub or download Citus here.

By now, you've likely heard the line "SQL doesn...