Comment by zozbot234
18 hours ago
PostgreSQL actually supports sharding out of the box, it's just a matter of setting up the right table partitioning and using Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) to forward queries to remote databases. I'm not sure what the post is referencing when they say that sharding requires leaving Postgres altogether.
Shameless plug: https://github.com/mkleczek/pgwrh automates it quite a bit.
This is specifically what they said about sharding
> The primary rationale is that sharding existing application workloads would be highly complex and time-consuming, requiring changes to hundreds of application endpoints and potentially taking months or even years
> potentially taking months or even years
On one hand OAI sell coding agents and constantly hype how easy it will replace developers and most of the code written is by agents, on the other hand they claim it will take years to refactor
Both cannot be true at the same time.
Genuinely sounds like the kind of challenge that could be solved with a swarm of Codex coding agents. I'm surprised they aren't treating this as an ideal use-case to show off their stack!
Oh snap! Maybe it's all a great deception for making money?
I read your message, guessed the author, and I’m happy to announce I guessed correctly.
Getting the sharing in-place, yes, but maintaining it operationally would still be a headache. Things like schema migrations across shards, resharding, and even observability.
It wouldn’t work.
I know they said that, but in fact sharding is entirely a database-level concern. The application need not be aware of it at all.
Sharding can be made mostly transparent, but it's not purely a DB-level concern in practice. Once data is split across nodes, join patterns, cross-shard transactions, global uniqueness, certain keys hit with a lot of traffic, etc matter a lot. Even if partitioning handles routing, the application's query patterns and its consistency/latency requirements can still force application-level changes.
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