Comparing Citus Database Options

Relational database semantics

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

Horizontal scalability & sharding

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 SQL engine

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

Extension to Postgres

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

Rich data types & Postgres extensions

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.

3 ways to get Citus

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

Compatible with popular programming languages, includes Rails & Django support

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.

Tenant isolation

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.

Zero-downtime shard rebalancer

When adding nodes to a Citus cluster, the zero-downtime 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.

Simple provisioning & easy to scale out

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.

Fully-managed database as a service

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.

Citus Security features in the cloud

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