Real-Time Analytics

Customer-facing analytics dashboards often require sub-second response times. By sharding and parallelizing PostgreSQL queries across a cluster, the Citus database makes it possible to query billions of records in under a second.

Are You Having Trouble Delivering Sub-Second Responses Over Billions of Rows?

Are you trying to find a way to maintain sub-second responses as your dataset grows?

Are you worried about having to give up SQL in order to scale out your database?

Are your users having to wait too long for responses to dashboard queries?

Do your customers need to analyze new events & new data as it happens, in real-time?

Does your database performance deteriorate with high concurrency?

Are you fed up with stitching together different databases to get the functionality you need?

Are you looking for a way to parallelize your SQL queries?

Are you worried about having to query raw data to answer all your requests?

Do you wish you could get the job done with Postgres?

SQL code for real-time events

Enable Users to Analyze Real-Time Events as They Happen

The Citus extension to PostgreSQL is good at scaling out event data pipelines. For many of our real-time analytics customers, it’s critical that events be analyzed as they happen. Because Citus parallelizes SQL over multiple nodes, Citus can provide real-time responsiveness, even with terabytes of data. Moreover, Citus can pre-aggregate the data in parallel across all servers using standard SQL commands to enable millisecond query times even with billions of events per day.

Algolia's search analytics
Algolia’s Search Analytics, powered by Citus on Azure

Deliver Sub-Second Responses to Your Customer Facing Dashboards

Traditional data warehouses are good at supporting teams of in-house data analysts, but not as good at supporting thousands of customers all querying their dashboards at the same time. Because of the intelligent way Citus distributes SQL over multiple nodes, you get massive parallelism AND concurrency, with Citus coordinating hundreds or even thousands of cores for high performance data ingest and fast analytical queries. With support for advanced subqueries and complex joins on co-located tables and reference tables, you can even do advanced queries such as search and funnel analysis. So your users get the insights they need with your interactive dashboards. Citus works well for both real time dashboards and historical dashboards over long time windows.

Convertflow dashboard
Real-time analytics for ConvertFlow marketing calls-to-action, powered by Citus on Azure

Get Insanely Fast Analytics Without Re-Architecting Your App

One of our customers describes Citus as insanely fast for real-time analytics (yay.) There are other benefits as well. The fact that Citus is built on Postgres means that applications which are compatible with Postgres will have a faster path to deploying on Citus (the same is true for teams with deep Postgres expertise already)—adopting Citus does not require large-scale application changes. And because Citus is an extension to Postgres (not a fork like so many others), you’ll always be on the most up-to-date version of PostgreSQL. Plus you get all the other Postgres data types and extensions, like JSONB, PostGIS, full text search, HyperLogLog. The list goes on.

Postgres icon

Simplify Your Stack by Scaling Out Postgres

Some data pipeline solutions are really, really good at one thing. This has caused practitioners to have to stitch together multiple different database technologies to get the job done. One of the things our customers love about Citus is that Citus is multipurpose: you can combine powerful SQL queries with fast inserts and updates, and you can combine analytics workloads with transactional systems of record—reducing the complexity and cost of your operations. All the while keeping the powerful and familiar PostgreSQL expressiveness and features in your toolchest.

Why Citus for Real-Time Analytics Dashboards?

  1. Want to leverage Postgres reliability, rich data types, extensions, & expertise.
  2. Need to enable customers to analyze new events & new data as it happens, in real-time.
  3. Like the idea of staying current with latest Postgres (easy for us, because Citus is an extension.)
  4. The ability to do roll-ups & to pre-aggregate within the database is hugely appealing.
  5. Open source is important and do not want to be locked in to a specific vendor.
  1. Want to keep benefits of relational semantics & SQL: don’t want to give up JOINS to Cassandra.
  2. Have customer-facing dashboards with loads of concurrent users who don’t want to wait for responses.
  3. Looking for an analytics solution that parallelizes SQL & provides millisecond responses.
  4. Don’t want to have stitch together multiple different database technologies to get the job done.
  5. Like convenient set of choices with Citus: open source, on-prem software, & a cloud database.

Citus is Available in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

Citus is available in the cloud with Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. If your customer-facing analytics dashboards need the parallelized performance of the Citus database, you can now scale out Postgres horizontally on Azure.

Learn More About Citus & Real-Time Analytics Apps

Ready to See if Citus is Right for You?