Boston PostgreSQL Users Group (BPUG)

Hi everyone,

We will be hosting a Boston PostgreSQL meetup event on May 20th, 2026 between 6:30PM and 8:30 PM ET at the Datadog Boston office. The speakers will be talking about - Sharding Postgres with the Citus Extension: Tradeoffs and Early Lessons.

Please RSVP for this meetup event before May 19th 2026.

Below is the abstract for the topic and brief bio about our speakers -
Abstract

When you can no longer move to a bigger Postgres instance but still need to handle higher write rates — or when your tables are measured in terabytes and tuning autovacuum starts to feel like a zero-sum game — sharding looks like a magic bullet. But what does sharding actually mean in practice, and what tradeoffs does it introduce?

In this talk, we’ll discuss why we began evaluating sharding Postgres at Datadog and explore the Citus extension as one approach. We’ll touch on how it compares to other solutions, the core architectural ideas behind it, the benefits it can provide, and the realities of moving from a single-node database to a distributed system. Along the way, we’ll share insights from our early experiments and what surprised us, both good and not so good.

Our goal is to give you some insight into what was required to get a Citus Postgres up and running and what adaptations your ecosystem may need. We also hope you’ll gain a better understanding of what is required for an application to work with sharded tables and what kind of gains to expect.

About the speakers
Alex Adriaanse is a Senior Software Engineer at Datadog, where he works on the Postgres infrastructure team, focusing on the reliability and scalability of the databases that power Datadog’s products.

Iñaki Serraller Vizcaino is a software engineer with 25 years of experience operating and building distributed systems and databases. He is very enthusiastic about the possibilities for distributed SQL databases and how to help teams operate at scale with minimal overhead.