Learn How to Create Dynamic Partitions with PostgreSQL
A step by step guide to automatically shard your big data tables
5 min readOct 30, 2018
I used to lead a tech team in a previous company where we had a business requirement to analyze chat data for our live trivia mobile app.
While seemingly simple, this effort required us to pause and consider the following question:
“How can we efficiently read and write chat data?”
With over a million users and counting, our chat database can grow really big and really fast — so it’s all about scalability. In response, the answer is partitioning!
Some basic definitions
Before we get started, here’s a few basic terms.
- Partitioning refers to splitting a large table into smaller tables.
- Dynamic refers to constantly changing.
- Dynamic Partitioning thus refers to automatically splitting a large table into smaller tables.
Now that we’re on the same page, let’s go more in depth on how we can achieve dynamic partitioning with PostgreSQL!