Citus Blog

If you've used a relational database, you understand basic INSERT statements. Even if you come from a NoSQL background, you likely grok inserts. Within the Postgres world, there is a utility that is useful for fast bulk ingestion: \copy. Postgres \copy is a mechanism for you to bulk load data in or out of Postgres.

First, lets pause. Do you even need to bulk load data and what's it have to do with Citus? We see customers leverage Citus for a number of different uses. When looking at Citus for a transactional workload, say as the system of record for some kind of multi-tenant SaaS app, your app is mostly performing standard insert/updates/deletes.

But when you're leveraging Citus for real-time analytics, you may already have a separate ingest pipeline. In this case you might be looking at event data, which can be higher in volume than a standard web app workload. If you already have an ingest pipeline that reads off Apache Kafka or Kinesis, you could be a great candidate for bulk ingest.

Back to our feature presentation: Postgres \copy. Copy is interesting because you can achieve much higher throughput than with single row inserts.

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Having a database staging environment that is as close to production as possible is key to being able to test your app. This applies to both your code and to your database. Far too often a staging database is a forgotten child in your stack—not getting the same love and attention as your production instance. For some teams, their staging database is years old, or worse yet, their staging database is a 10 GB sample of a 2 TB production database.

What if you could easily have a full staging environment to experiment with, that is an exact copy of your production database? Even if that production database is 50 TB?

As of today on Citus Cloud—our fully-managed database as a service that is built to scale-out (and based on Postgres!)—you can get a full fork of your production database with the click of a button.

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