Mar 2018 Newsletter from the database people at Citus Data

Announcing TopN—a new open source extension for Postgres

People seem to love lists of the most popular things. Whether it’s the top grossing sales reps or the most visited pages on your website, for most of us, there is usually something for which we want to know the top “N”. Inspired by a Citus Data customer, TopN is a new extension to Postgres which we are excited to make available to the PostgreSQL community. In this post, Furkan tells us all the things about TopN.
Read the TopN post →

The Postgres 10 feature you didn’t know about: CREATE STATISTICS

This post from Samay recently hit the front page of Hacker News. Before Postgres 10, there wasn’t an easy way to tell the planner to collect statistics which capture the relationship between columns. But, with Postgres 10, there’s a new feature which is built to solve exactly this problem.
Explore the new CREATE STATISTICS feature →

Database constraints in Postgres: The last line of defense

Constraints are an extremely powerful construct for your database. And when it comes to your database, constraints are the last line of defense. Inspired by his talk at pgDay Paris, Will Leinweber explains how constraints are essentially rules that your data has to follow.
Get Will’s take on database constraints →

Distributed Execution of Subqueries and CTEs in Citus

The latest release of the Citus database brings a number of exciting improvements for analytical queries across all the data and for real-time analytics applications. @marcoslot explains how Citus’s distributed query planner handles subqueries that can be distributed in a single round, as well as multi-stage queries that use the new recursive planning feature.
Dive deeper into how Citus handles subqueries →

Fun with SQL: generate_series in Postgres

Postgres has a wealth of hidden gems. Craig Kerstiens shares some of his favorite uses of a simple but handy set-returning function. This function allows you to generate a set of data starting at one point, ending at another point, and optionally set the incrementing value.
Read Craig’s post →

Citus Data internal hackathon roundup

During our team offsites, we often organize developer hackathons to proof out new ideas, learn new things, or just for fun. We recently completed one of our Citus hackathons and thought we’d share some of what we built.
See our hackathon results: landlords and heroes →

Fun with SQL: Relocating shards on a Citus database cluster

With the Citus shard rebalancer, you can easily scale your database cluster from 2 nodes to 3 nodes or 4 nodes, with zero downtime. Because the Citus database is an extension to Postgres, all of the metadata we use to coordinate and optimize queries and transactions in Citus is available for you to access and query.
Sai shares shard rebalancer insights →

ICYMI: Three Approaches to PostgreSQL Replication and Backup

When we talk to Citus users, we often hear questions about setting up Postgres high availability (HA) clusters and managing backups. How do you handle replication and machine failures? What challenges do you run into when setting up Postgres HA? Ozgun tells all about the 3 approaches to replication in PostgreSQL.
Read Ozgun’s post →

Our Team of Experts Has Been Making the Rounds

If you & your team haven’t (yet) had a chance to hear us talk about the future of distributed databases, check out our Citus Data Events page to see where we'll be next. (And to view slides from recent talks, too.) If your favorite conference is missing from our list, please let us know, we'd love your ideas. :)
See where we will be →

Citans are giving a lot of conference talks in April. Come say hello.

Is Citus right for you?

Want to explore whether Citus is right for you and your use case? Learn more about the Citus product, check out the documentation, or let us know if you want to book a demo.