Chapter 16. Scalability

This final chapter of the book will be dedicated to the problem of scalability. This term means the ability of a software system to grow with the growth of the business using it. PostgreSQL does provide some features that help building a scalable solution but, strictly speaking, PostgreSQL itself is not scalable. It can effectively utilize the resources of a single machine:

• It uses multiple CPU cores to perform a single query faster with parallel query
• When configured properly, it can use all available memory for caching
• The size of the database is not limited by PostgreSQL; supporting multiple tablespaces, it can use several hard disks and with partitioning, it can do this quickly and transparently to the users

However, when it comes to spreading a database solution to multiple machines, it can be quite problematic because a standard PostgreSQL server can only run on a single machine. That's why in this chapter, we will talk not only about PostgreSQL itself, but rather...