Database sharding explained in plain English

Our engineers are often asked to walk people through what sharding is, and how it works. In building Citus to scale out Postgres, we've learned a few things. Here’s how Craig explains it. In plain English.
More about database sharding → 

PostgresOpen CFP closes June 30th

PostgresOpen, the largest community-run Postgres event in the US, is in Orlando, FL this year from Sep 11-13. The event will be packed with tutorials and talks, but the best part is the hallway conversations. Come and tell your Postgres story.
Submit a talk → 

Creating a scalable time series database with PostgreSQL, pg_partman, & Citus

With time-based partitioning you can create tables that are distributed across nodes by ID and partitioned by time on disk. Partitioning your distributed time series tables by time with pg_partman provides optimization to reduce the cost of queries on the most recent data, time-ordered writes, and data expiration. Craig explains how in this post.
Read the pg_partman post → 

PostgreSQL rocks, except when it blocks: Understanding locks

In one of our most popular posts, Marco takes the mystery out of Postgres locking behaviors. Why? Because, while Postgres is amazing at running multiple operations at the same time, there are a few cases in which Postgres needs to block an operation using a lock.
More on Postgres locks → 

Fun with SQL: generate_series in Postgres

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. One more Postgres hidden gem.
Read Craig’s post → 

Want to stay updated about Citus on Microsoft Azure?

We’ve made it easy for you. Just sign up to the Citus on Azure interest list. We’ll let you know when things happen with Hyperscale (Citus), now available in preview on Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
Join the Citus on Azure interest list → 

4000 stars on Github!

As I type, there are 3,594 stars on our citusdata/citus GitHub repo. We’ve set a new nice big goal of 4000 stars, and we hope you will help us reach it. For those folks that are discovering Citus for the first time, this kind of social support really matters. So, if you’re an advocate for Citus and how Citus helps developers scale out performance, lend us a hand, and give us a star. :-)
Star Citus on GitHub → 

Brandur’s article: SortSupport: Sorting in Postgres at Speed

SortSupport is a good example of the type of low-level optimization that most people probably wouldn’t bother with in their projects, but which makes sense in an extremely leveraged system like a database. In this article, Brandur explains the pros and cons of optimizations, and goes in depth on SortSupport.
More on SortSupport → 

How Citus & Microsoft Azure can help your operational analytics—a short video

Want 2 millisecond query response times, even with concurrency of real-time data ingest and 50K queries per second? In this demo, Citus engineer Marco Slot shows you how to use a 10-node Hyperscale (Citus) database cluster on Azure Database for PostgreSQL—with 320 cores and 2.5 TB of memory —to do just that. w00t.
Watch the demo → 

ICYMI: pg_auto_failover: a new open source Postgres extension for high availability

Learn how pg_auto_failover works from Dimitri Fontaine, one of the developers of pg_auto_failover. When designing pg_auto_failover, our goal was to provide an easy-to-set-up business continuity solution for Postgres that implements fault tolerance of any node in the system.
Read the deets on pg_auto_failover → 

Where can you find Citans this summer?

• At Postgres London, Louise will tell “A story of Postgres index types”

• Also at Postgres London, Will to talk on “When it all goes wrong (with Postgres)”

• Claire will be at the Postgres Women NYC meetup with “Why Postgres? Why This Database? Why Now?”

• The Postgres team at Microsoft (including Citus) is pleased to sponsor PGDay Amsterdam

• At PGConf.Brasil Dimitri Fontaine will present “The Art of Postgres”

• Louise Grandjonc will present “Amazing things your ORM(s) can and can't do” at PyBay in San Francisco

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.