Comparing Citus Database Options

Citus is Postgres, which means we offer relational database features like ACID transactions, joins, foreign key constraints, and SQL coverage.

Citus is an extension to Postgres that enables you to scale out Postgres across multiple nodes, giving your Postgres database a much larger memory, compute, and disk footprint than on a single-node. And increasing performance in a big way. At Citus, we like to say that we make sharding simple.

Distributed query planner and executor that parallelizes queries across shards, enabling massive parallelism and efficient resource utilization.

Citus is not a fork, rather we use PostgreSQL’s extension APIs to scale out. We give you trusted, familiar Postgres.

PostgreSQL and Citus support 40+ data types, including semi-structured data types and JSONB. Popular Postgres extensions frequently used with Citus include HyperLogLog (HLL), PostGIS, TopN, hstore, pg stat statements, dblink, plpgsql, uuid ossp, ltree, & more.

Citus is available as open source, as on-prem enterprise software (Citus Enterprise), and in the cloud as Hyperscale (Citus), a built-in option in Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Works with Ruby, Python, Java, Node.js, Javascript, Go, C++. And to make it easy to migrate your multi-tenant Rails and Django apps to Citus, we’ve created PostgreSQL libraries: activerecord-multi-tenant gem on Rails, and django-multitenant library for Django.

When adding nodes to a Citus cluster, the shard rebalancer enables you to redistribute shards across old and new nodes to better balance the data distribution and the performance of your Citus database.

Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure Database for PostgreSQL includes fully automated HA; Citus Enterprise includes support for automated monitoring and management of failover for a Citus database cluster.

Multi-tenant SaaS applications sometimes need to isolate the shards for a large customer to ensure that the large customer gets the resources they need and doesn’t negatively impact performance for everyone else. Hence: tenant isolation.

In Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, you can provision a cluster (called a ‘server group’) in just a few clicks; adding more nodes & increasing memory, compute, and disk is simple, too.

Citus is available in the cloud, built into Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a fully-managed database as a service. Available in a growing list of Azure regions, Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure Database for PostgreSQL includes automated backups, point in time recovery, automated health checks, & automated monitoring.

Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure Database for PostgreSQL includes 2FA, encryption at rest and in flight, firewall rules, and of course continual review of security vulnerabilities.