Citus documentation

Citus is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database, enabling horizontal scaling across multiple nodes. It powers multi-tenant SaaS applications, real-time analytics dashboards, and high-throughput transactional workloads while preserving full PostgreSQL compatibility.

Get started with Citus

Overview

• What is Citus?
• Use cases for Citus
• Application types

Get started

• Getting started guide
• Single-node Citus
• Multi-node Citus

Quickstart

• Single-node with Docker
• Single-node on Debian/Ubuntu
• Single-node on RHEL/CentOS

Data modeling and design

Concept

• Data modeling overview
• Designing multi-tenant SaaS applications
• Table management

How-To Guide

• Sharding a multitenant app
• Semi-structured data with JSONB
• Faceted search patterns

Tutorials

Tutorial

• Multi-tenant applications
• Real-time analytics dashboard
• Time-series data
• Microservices architecture

Guides and best practices

Concept

• Efficient rollup tables with HyperLogLog
• HyperLogLog for count distinct
• Parallel indexing
• Aggregation optimization
• Outer joins in distributed queries

How-To Guide

• Metrics dashboard
• Performance tuning
• Diagnostic queries
• Benchmarking

API and SQL reference

Reference

• API overview
• User-defined functions (UDFs)
• GUC parameters
• Metadata tables

Concept

• SQL reference
• DDL operations
• DML operations
• Query processing
• Query propagation

Migration and upgrades

Overview

• Citus Cloud migration

How-To Guide

• Upgrade Citus
• Cluster management

Concept

• Reference workarounds
• Common errors

Multi-node deployment

Overview

• Multi-node overview

How-To Guide

• Multi-node (Ubuntu or Debian)
• Multi-node (Fedora, CentOS, or Red Hat)

Additional resources

Concept

• Integrations
• Triggers
• PostgreSQL Citus scale

Reference

• Full reference documentation
• FAQ
• Support