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Determining application type for Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

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APPLIES TO: Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL (powered by the Citus database extension to PostgreSQL)

Running efficient queries on a cluster requires that tables be properly distributed across servers. The recommended distribution varies by the type of application and its query patterns.

There are broadly two kinds of applications that work well on Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. The first step in data modeling is to identify which of them more closely resembles your application.

At a Glance

Multi-Tenant Applications Real-Time Applications
Sometimes dozens or hundreds of tables in schema Small number of tables
Queries relating to one tenant (company/store) at a time Relatively simple analytics queries with aggregations
OLTP workloads for serving web clients High ingest volume of mostly immutable data
OLAP workloads that serve per-tenant analytical queries Often centering around large table of events

Examples and Characteristics

Multi-Tenant Application

These are typically SaaS applications that serve other companies, accounts, or organizations. Most SaaS applications are inherently relational. They have a natural dimension on which to distribute data across nodes: just shard by tenant_id.

Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL enables you to scale out your database to millions of tenants without having to re-architect your application. You can keep the relational semantics you need, like joins, foreign key constraints, transactions, ACID, and consistency.

  • Examples: Websites which host store-fronts for other businesses, such as a digital marketing solution, or a sales automation tool.
  • Characteristics: Queries relating to a single tenant rather than joining information across tenants. This includes OLTP workloads for serving web clients, and OLAP workloads that serve per-tenant analytical queries. Having dozens or hundreds of tables in your database schema is also an indicator for the multi-tenant data model.

Scaling a multi-tenant app with Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL also requires minimal changes to application code. We have support for popular frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django.

Real-Time Analytics

Applications needing massive parallelism, coordinating hundreds of cores for fast results to numerical, statistical, or counting queries. By sharding and parallelizing SQL queries across multiple nodes, Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL makes it possible to perform real-time queries across billions of records in under a second.

Tables in real-time analytics data models are typically distributed by columns like user_id, host_id, or device_id.

  • Examples: Customer-facing analytics dashboards requiring sub-second response times.
  • Characteristics: Few tables, often centering around a big table of device-, site- or user-events and requiring high ingest volume of mostly immutable data. Relatively simple (but computationally intensive) analytics queries involving several aggregations and GROUP BYs.

If your situation resembles either case above, then the next step is to decide how to shard your data in the cluster. The database administrator's choice of distribution columns needs to match the access patterns of typical queries to ensure performance.

Next steps