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Breakout Session Presented by Dan Robinson of Heap at PGConf Silicon Valley 2015

Citus Data · 14.3K views · 2015-11-24 · 54:54

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Overview

Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as a first-hand overview of Heap's Postgres/Citus architecture and its distinctive indexing approach.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2016–2020

Topics

Databases & storageDistributed systemsData science & statistics
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postgresqlcitusevent analyticsindexingkafkasharding

What people said

Judson · 2016-05 · Strong recommendation

I was just watching this[0] excellent talk from one of the Heap Analytics engineers on their use of CitusDB + Postgres to do event processing. What use-case would TrailDB be the obvious, hands-down way to go (vs maybe Postgres + Citus)? [0]: [VIDEO]

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macobo · 2017-06 · Recommendation

You need a queue in front of your database irregardless of write latency. Otherwise you tie your availability to database availability as downtime (even for upgrades) is often unavoidable and network problems are common. Dan gave a pretty good talk about the high-level details of how/why postgres a couple of years back: [VIDEO] . One reason of why pg is that SQL is really powerful for building complex queries.

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macobo · 2017-01 · Recommendation

Regarding a), a sharded postgresql (i.e. with citus data) can easily accomodate that workflow with just a tiny bit of extra overhead. Re c) this strongly depends on the usecase, I've seen companies use a) to avoid split-brain problems and having to manage two data pipelines to great success at similar scales. You might find [VIDEO] interesting.

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Sources

Video by Citus Data, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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