The Future of pg_shard

[pg_shard users]

Near the end of 2014, Citus Data released pg_shard, the first open-source sharding extension for PostgreSQL. In the years since, we’ve been delighted by the community response and ecstatic to see our project’s adoption within several production deployments. The PostgreSQL ecosystem is unique and we’re proud to be a part of it.

But pg_shard also served a purpose within Citus Data: it provided real-time insert capabilities to our own flagship product. And we soon realized we wanted to share that product with the world, too. Without pg_shard, the newly open-sourced Citus would still lack real-time inserts, but with it as a separate extension, installation would be unnecessarily complicated.

Our solution? As we carefully extracted Citus’ functionality into a PostgreSQL extension, we merged in pg_shard’s codebase. The result is Citus 5.0: a single extension which provides the advanced distributed query planning previously only enjoyed by CitusDB customers while preserving the drop-dead simple sharding and real-time modification features pg_shard brought to the PostgreSQL ecosystem those many months ago. And it’s all open-source.

So where does that leave pg_shard? We’ll not be making any more releases and the project is entering end-of-life status. The new Citus extension provides a superset of the functionality of pg_shard and we have migration steps to help existing customers perform a drop-in replacement. Contact us for more information, or feel free to drop in to our IRC channel to have questions answered in real-time.

And if there’s a feature you were really rooting for, or something you never quite figured out how to do using pg_shard, feel free to resurrect the topic in the Citus repository. We’re putting all our development efforts behind our new unified product and are excited to see where we can take it. Thank you for your help in shaping pg_shard, and we hope to see you soon in a Citus GitHub issue or mailing list post. Happy sharding!