Citus

AGPL-3.0 Postgres extension for distributed tables

Databases / Data · AGPL-3.0 · 12.8k

Reviewed 2026-10-18 · last push 2026-10-18 · repo checked 2026-10-19

What's Good

AGPL-3.0 (citusdata/citus), release v14.2.0 (2026-08-06), developed since 2016 and now maintained by Microsoft. Distributed tables are sharded across nodes, reference tables are replicated everywhere for joins, the distributed query engine parallelises SELECT and DML, and columnar storage speeds scans. Strong fit for multi-tenant SaaS (shard by tenant), real-time analytics and time series. The project says Citus is 100% open source. ★~12.8k.

The Catch

Sharding means choosing a distribution column well; a poor choice makes cross-shard queries slow. AGPL-3.0 matters if you modify Citus and offer it as a service. Not every managed Postgres lets you install it, so you often self-host or use Azure's managed version. Cluster ops are more involved than one Postgres box.

Verdict

The most Postgres-native way to scale out — pick your shard key carefully.

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