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

Citus Data · talk · Watch on YouTube

Databases & storageDistributed systemsData science & statistics

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2020

What HN commenters said

  1. “excellent talk from one of the Heap Analytics engineers”

    Heap's use of Citus and Postgres for event processing

    Judson, 2016-05 · Strong recommendation · in “TrailDB – An Efficient Library for Storing and Processing Event Data”

  2. “Dan from Heap Analytics has a great talk about how they use Postgres and Citus.”

    How Heap uses Postgres and Citus

    devbug, 2016-08 · Recommendation · in “Building a Scalable Postgres Metrics Backend Using the Citus Extension”

  3. “I like this[1] talk, it gives you an overview of their architecture.”

    Overview of Heap's architecture

    simiano, 2016-09 · Recommendation · in “When to Avoid JSONB in a PostgreSQL Schema”

  4. “You might find interesting.”

    Relevant to sharded Postgres workflows

    macobo, 2017-01 · Recommendation · in “How Discord Stores Billions of Messages Using Cassandra”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: postgresql, citus, event analytics, indexing, kafka, sharding

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