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> 2) Horizontal scalability without having to resort to an extension like Citus. Just curious, what would save you having the solution in-core? Installation, s

> 2) Horizontal scalability without having to resort to an extension like Citus. Just curious, what would save you having the solution in-core? Installation, sure, but that's a one-off possibly in your deployment code. "CREATE EXTENSION citus" and add that to postgresql.conf? Sure, but not too much work for me. The rest (commands to actually create the nodes, do the sharding itself) are something I cannot imagine being different or simpler if with an in-core solution. What am I missing?

threeseed 4y ago
It means that when you upgrade PostgreSQL you don't have to worry if the extensions are compatible and have been fully tested not just for functionality but security etc as well. And most importantly it means you don't have to worry if that extension will move to a freemium model which (a) often has important features out of your price range and (b) is generally unacceptable in enterprise environments.
- ahachete 4y ago
  Right, those are compulsory steps for every upgrade. Yet in the particular case of Citus, history (so far) has shown a) that they update the extension regularly and fast, so by the time you want to upgrade to a newer major version you already have Citus updated too; b) they are going exactly in the opposite direction of "freemium", they actually open sourced even the previous proprietary bits; c) as OSS, it can always be forked and if one day closed source, being such an important project, it would be definitely forked. (I don't have any stakes on Citus)
  - Keyframe 4y ago
    Citus is Microsoft for quite awhile now. Take what you will from that.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    The "you can always fork Citus" argument is not workable. Scaling databases is an expert skill that is far out of reach for almost everyone. Far easier just to pick another database that includes HA and horizontal scalability out of the box.
    - ahachete 4y ago
      Sharding databases is not such a dark, magic art. Citus relies on Postgres for many key features; and Citus does the rest. It's already quite "feature complete". If Citus would become proprietary overnight, my main concerns of maintaining a fork would be around the codebase and the language expertise more than the sharding concepts. Note that sharding is different from a purely distributed database. The latter is an entirely different class (and more complex system).
      - threeseed 4y ago
        The more likely scenario is that Citus simply disappears entirely and becomes an internal feature of Azure.
contrahax 4y ago
You can’t use those extensions on almost any cloud like AWS, GCP, Aiven, etc. - I think Azure is the only one offering a citus product because they acquired them. Also extension updates are a major pain point in hosted DBs - always lagging behind. Having some solution in core would resolve this, even if it was just bundling some best in class extensions out of the box to bypass these cloud providers very selective extension support.

threeseed 4y ago

It means that when you upgrade PostgreSQL you don't have to worry if the extensions are compatible and have been fully tested not just for functionality but security etc as well. And most importantly it means you don't have to worry if that extension will move to a freemium model which (a) often has important features out of your price range and (b) is generally unacceptable in enterprise environments.

ahachete 4y ago
Right, those are compulsory steps for every upgrade. Yet in the particular case of Citus, history (so far) has shown a) that they update the extension regularly and fast, so by the time you want to upgrade to a newer major version you already have Citus updated too; b) they are going exactly in the opposite direction of "freemium", they actually open sourced even the previous proprietary bits; c) as OSS, it can always be forked and if one day closed source, being such an important project, it would be definitely forked. (I don't have any stakes on Citus)
- Keyframe 4y ago
  Citus is Microsoft for quite awhile now. Take what you will from that.
- threeseed 4y ago
  The "you can always fork Citus" argument is not workable. Scaling databases is an expert skill that is far out of reach for almost everyone. Far easier just to pick another database that includes HA and horizontal scalability out of the box.
  - ahachete 4y ago
    Sharding databases is not such a dark, magic art. Citus relies on Postgres for many key features; and Citus does the rest. It's already quite "feature complete". If Citus would become proprietary overnight, my main concerns of maintaining a fork would be around the codebase and the language expertise more than the sharding concepts. Note that sharding is different from a purely distributed database. The latter is an entirely different class (and more complex system).
    - threeseed 4y ago
      The more likely scenario is that Citus simply disappears entirely and becomes an internal feature of Azure.

contrahax 4y ago

You can’t use those extensions on almost any cloud like AWS, GCP, Aiven, etc. - I think Azure is the only one offering a citus product because they acquired them. Also extension updates are a major pain point in hosted DBs - always lagging behind. Having some solution in core would resolve this, even if it was just bundling some best in class extensions out of the box to bypass these cloud providers very selective extension support.