PG Phriday: Postgres-XL and Horizontal Scaling
With all of the upheaval in the Postgres world thanks to advancements in extensions, foreign data wrappers, and background workers, it’s getting pretty difficult to keep track of everything! One of these rapidly moving targets is Postgres-XL and its role in helping Postgres scale outward. Large warehouses have a critical need for horizontal scaling, as the very laws of physics make it effectively impossible to perform aggregate queries on tables consisting of several billion rows. Even furiously indexed, partitioned, and clustered tables, on over-provisioned servers loaded with the best NVRAM-based storage, 64 CPUS, and 1TB of RAM, become lumbering beasts when someone wants a cumulative summary of last year’s activity.