This video of Sai Srirampur’s talk at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres explains why the “Distribution Column” (or shard key) lies at the heart of the Citus superpower of distributed PostgreSQL tables. The shard key determines how data is distributed (aka sharded) in the database cluster and how efficiently your Postgres queries are executed by Citus. In this talk from the Americas livestream at Citus Con, Sai shares various criteria required to choose an optimal shard key for Citus.
Some of the sharding key criteria include workload type, table sizes, cardinality of column(s), commonality of column(s) across tables etc. Sai walks through each of them using real-world examples and presents an organized approach you can follow to pick the right distribution column for your PostgreSQL database workload.
Finally, the icing on the cake, Sai explores the possibilities and ideas for a tool which heuristically assesses the shard key criteria to automatically predict optimal shard key(s).
Sai Srirampur leads the Customer Engineering team for the Citus extension to Postgres within Microsoft. Sai’s team is responsible for making technical onboarding easy for customers. This includes providing direct expert guidance to customers who are implementing Citus and building tools to make the database migration journey seamless.
► Video bookmarks:
⏩ 00:00 Introduction
⏩ 01:31 What is Citus?
⏩ 04:24 What is a distribution column & why is it important?
⏩ 09:22 3 steps to building highly scalable apps with Citus
⏩ 10:43 Multi-tenant SaaS apps
⏩ 15:40 Real-time operational analytics apps
⏩ 19:33 High throughput transactional apps
⏩ 22:14 Exploring automation of choosing the right shard key
⏩ 24:31 Q&A with Sai & Marco
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