PostgreSQL Server Programming - Second Edition

Summary

In this chapter, we have gone over the process of database sharding for databases that are too big to take the write load on a single host, or where you just want to have the added resilience of having a system where one host being down does not bring the whole system down.

In short, the process is:

• Decide which tables you want to split over multiple hosts
• Define a partitioning key
• Add the partition databases and move the data
• Set up the proxy functions for all the functions accessing those tables
• Watch for a little while that everything is working
• Relax

We also took a brief look at using PL/Proxy for simple remote queries to other PostgreSQL databases, which may be handy for some tasks, even after the new Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) functionality ...