Manual Record Sharding for High-Performance Updates in Postgres

UPDATE is a dangerous operation in a high-throughput postgres database, and so it is often best to prefer an insert-only schema. But of course there is no free lunch, and an insert-only schema comes with drawbacks of its own. In this post, we talk about a simple mechanism for manually sharding rows in order to enable high-frequency updates for certain kinds of data. This method is especially…