Top all-time · #212
Citus Data
Company blog · citusdata.com/blogdataprogramming
Citus Data is the company blog at citusdata.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2012, 224 different Hacker News readers have linked it 563 times, most often “Ways to paginate in Postgres (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Citus Data's blog on Postgres scaling, sharding, pagination, SQL and query performance. HN commenters link it when discussing Postgres scale-out and specific techniques.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Citus gives you all the greatness of Postgres plus the superpowers of distributed tables. By distributing your data and queries, your application gets high performance—at any scale. The Citus database is available as open source and as a managed service on Azure.
Most-linked posts?
- /27 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2015-10-28
- Ways to paginate in Postgres (2016)11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-07-27
- /10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-07-26
- It's the Future (for databases)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-05-08
- Faster PostgreSQL Counting7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-10-12
- Citus 10 brings columnar compression to Postgres6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-03-06
- Analyzing the Limits of Connection Scalability in Postgres6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-10-08
- Citus 11 for Postgres goes fully open source, with query from any node5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-06-17
- Unstructured Datatypes in Postgres – Hstore vs. JSON vs. JSONB5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-07-14
- Citus 10: Columnar for Postgres, rebalancer in open source, single-node, & more5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-03-05
What Hacker News says?
I believe this is the one they're referring to on pagination: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/03/30/five-ways-to-pagin... Though hopefully you'll find many more useful ones about Citus and Postgres broadly on our blog: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source as a story · 763 points
HN discussionCraig from Citus here. Thanks for the kind words. We've seen a lot of people scale-out transactional workloads with Citus as well. In particular, we've seen a lot of multi-tenant apps that need to keep scaling beyond a single node when they're running into memory or compute issues. If you are looking for something that is more Postgres flavored (meaning we're just an extension to it so you get all the good stuff of…
Comment linking /pricing/
on “Introducing Cloud Spanner, a Global Database Service”Submitted Citus Data Donates 1% of Equity to PostgreSQL Organizations as a story · 450 points
HN discussionThere are tons of ways to do that, the lazy way would probably be pay someone like Citus ( https://www.citusdata.com/product ). Alternatively, use a 3rd party tool, do manual sharding, or the PG FDW, or ... the list is pretty endless. Depends a lot on your needs, requirements, how much sharding you have to do, etc. It's not a simple topic. First I'd make sure your DB sizes really NEED that before going down that roa…
Comment linking /product
on “PostgreSQL 10 Released”Submitted Create Statistics in PostgreSQL 10 as a story · 357 points
HN discussionPostgres actually does have thousands of engineers but it's not easy to notice because they all share the same name. https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/04/20/analyzing-postgres...
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/20/analyzing-postgresql-email-archives/
on “Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE”Submitted Speeding up sort performance in Postgres 15 as a story · 321 points
HN discussionHave you considered Citus as your scale-out solution? https://www.citusdata.com - maybe you can have your PostgreSQL and eat it too.
Comment linking /
on “New in PostgreSQL 10”Submitted Principles of Sharding for Relational Databases as a story · 292 points
HN discussion> I believe Citus DB(?) is something similar. "Citus Unforks From PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source" https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/03/24/citus-unforks-goes... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353322 As for mysql - I don't know why anyone wouldn't prefer mariadb - but I suppose it's conceivable mysql has features that makes it worth dealing with oracle licensing. But I doubt it.
Comment linking /blog/2016/03/24/citus-unforks-goes-open-source/
on “System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server”Submitted What's new in the Postgres 16 query planner as a story · 265 points
HN discussionA blog post series I've been meaning to write for over 3 years now: * Every database a Postgres 1: Key/Value store * Every database a Postgres 2: Document stores * Every database a Postgres 3: Logs (Kafka-esque) * Every database a Postgres 4: Timeseries * Every database a Postgres 5: Full Text Search * Every database a Postgres 6: Message Queues Low key, you could make almost every single type of database a modern s…
Comment linking /blog/2021/03/05/citus-10-release-open-source-rebalancer-and-columnar-for-postgres/
on “Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL”Submitted SQL, Scaling, and What's Unique About Postgres as a story · 253 points
HN discussionThat's what generated columns [0] are for ;) There is very little you can't do on the side of the database these days. And if all of it fails, then stored procedures and triggers can solve the rest. We [1] as a rule don't allow any data to be post-processed once they leave the database and we run database of 100TB+ with trillions of rows with absolutely no problems. [0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-ge…
Comment linking /customers/pex
on “PostgREST”Submitted Designing a SaaS Database for Scale with Postgres as a story · 241 points
HN discussionThat's the same as saying "unoptimized selects can kill performance with large data sets". Of course they can. That's what optimization is for. We have quite large amount of data (100TB+ and trillions of rows at this point [0]) and no problem with views. [0] https://www.citusdata.com/customers/pex
Comment linking /customers/pex
on “PostgREST”Submitted Citus 10 brings columnar compression to Postgres as a story · 220 points
HN discussionYes, Citus may be a good fit, for a complete example see: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/15-marco-slot/402-interactive...
Comment linking /blog/15-marco-slot/402-interactive-analytics-github-data-using-postgresql-citus
on “Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source”Submitted Introducing WAL-G: Faster Disaster Recovery for Postgres as a story · 217 points
HN discussion(Ozgun from Citus Data) On PostgreSQL language support, we're updating our FAQ to have more information: https://www.citusdata.com/frequently-asked-questions Since the PostgreSQL manual (and its feature set) spans over 4K+ pages, we found that the best way to think about Citus' capabilities is from a use-case standpoint. If your workload needs distributed transactions that span across machines, or large ETL jobs, Ci…
Comment linking /frequently-asked-questions
on “Citus Unforks from PostgreSQL, Goes Open Source”Submitted PostgreSQL 11 and Just in Time Compilation of Queries as a story · 213 points
HN discussionDepending on your exact requirements, you can use pg_shard [1] for real-time inserts/update/delete, or CitusDB [2] for scaling out selects, or combine them. [1] https://github.com/citusdata/pg_shard [2] http://www.citusdata.com/ Disclaimer: I work for Citus Data.
Comment linking /
on “PostgreSQL 9.4 Released”Submitted Recursive Common Table Expressions in Postgres as a story · 202 points
HN discussionRoadmaps ( PostgreSQL ) 2016-2017-... * Postgres Professional roadmap ( Pluggable storages, Multimaster cluster with sharding, Effective partitioning, Adaptive query planning, Page-level data compression, Connection pooling, Native querying for jsonb with indexing support, ....) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Postgres_Professional_roadm... * EnterpriseDB database server roadmap ( Parallelism, Replication, Vertical…
Comment linking /
on “Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL”Submitted Citus 6.1 Released – Horizontally scale your Postgres database as a story · 194 points
HN discussionThe big news here: Citus Data donated 1% of their equity to non-profit PostgreSQL organizations[1] so this acquisition is a win for the community even in the darkest scenario of Citus Data disappearing into a canyon on the Microsoft campus. Given Microsoft's change in operation over recent years there's also hope that they can continue their contributions into the future. It's fascinating to see Microsoft leave behi…
Comment linking /newsroom/press/citus-data-donates-1-percent-equity-to-non-profit-postgresql-organizations/
on “Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11)”Submitted Postgres tips for Rails developers as a story · 192 points
HN discussionCitus improves the performance of OLAP query loads but it's not an analytics solution first. They say so themselves - https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/06/07/what-is-citus-good... --- When we first started building Citus, we began on the OLAP side. As time has gone on Citus has evolved to have full transactional support, first when targeting a single shard, and now fully distributed across your Citus database clus…
Comment linking /blog/2018/06/07/what-is-citus-good-for/
on “Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11)”Submitted PostgreSQL Columnar Store for Analytic Workloads as a story · 190 points
HN discussion
