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bohanoai

19 karma · joined May 23, 2025

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bohanoai··on OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level
> The key insight, and main message, of the talk was that if you are not too write heavy you can scale Postgres to very high read throughput with read replicas and only a single master! That is exactly the message that needs to be spelled out as that covers the vast majority of apps.

This is exactly the message I wanted to convey in the talk—thank you so much! -Bohan

bohanoai··on OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level
Speaker here — Bohan from OpenAI.

Our application has hundreds of endpoints, which makes sharding non-trivial. We've already offloaded shardable workloads—particularly write-heavy ones—from PostgreSQL. What remains is primarily read-only and would require substantial effort to shard. Currently, the workload scales well on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and we have sufficient headroom to support future growth.

That said, we're not ruling out sharding in the future—it’s just not a near-term priority.

bohanoai··on OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level
Speaker here — Bohan from OpenAI.

Just to clarify, we're using Azure Database for PostgreSQL, not a self-hosted setup. I mentioned "Azure Postgres" multiple times during the talk, but I should have been more specific that we're referring to Microsoft’s managed PostgreSQL service. Apologies for the confusion.