I like the way of thinking. Instead of migrating to another database, they keep that awesome one running and found smart workaround to push limits.
It is what mature engineering does. Migrations are not fun.
Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
21–30 of 145 posts
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#22ai written blog, its very generic and same context is repated many times
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#23Someone ask Microsoft what does it feel to be bested by an open source project on their very own cloud platform!!! Lol.
Are you saying this because OpenAI didnt choose SQL Server?
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#24Cool! I'd love to know a bit more about the replication setup. I'm guessing they are doing async replication.
> We added nearly 50 read replicas, while keeping replication lag near zero
I wonder what those replication lag numbers are exactly and how they deal with stragglers. It seems likely that at any given moment at least one of the 50 read replicas may be lagging cuz CPU/mem usage spike. Then presumably that would slow down the primary since it has to wait for the TCP acks before sending more of the WAL.
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is specifically what they said about sharding > The primary rationale is that sharding existing application workloads would be highly complex and time-consuming, requiring changes to hundreds of application endpoints and potentially taking months or even years
Genuinely sounds like the kind of challenge that could be solved with a swarm of Codex coding agents. I'm surprised they aren't treating this as an ideal use-case to show off their stack!
I read your message, guessed the author, and I’m happy to announce I guessed correctly.
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#26Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#27Someone ask Microsoft what does it feel to be bested by an open source project on their very own cloud platform!!! Lol.
They don't care. Azure has a revenue higher than GCP, losing only to AWS. It's Microsoft's new baby, and they love it, no matter what you want to run there. Also, they're still the 4th largest company by market cap.
Honestly, only us nerds in Hacker News care about this kind of stuff :) (and that's why I love it here).
edit: also, the article cites OpenAI did adopt Azure Cosmos DB for new stuff they want to shard. Still shows how far you can take PostgreSQL though.
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is specifically what they said about sharding > The primary rationale is that sharding existing application workloads would be highly complex and time-consuming, requiring changes to hundreds of application endpoints and potentially taking months or even years
Genuinely sounds like the kind of challenge that could be solved with a swarm of Codex coding agents. I'm surprised they aren't treating this as an ideal use-case to show off their stack!
It wouldn’t work.
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying this because OpenAI didnt choose SQL Server?
In 2026 is SQL Server ever the answer?
It really is a good database. Give it lots of room. If you can distribute your workload on multiple machines though, you can't beat Postgres' licencing terms vs SQL Server.
Re: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
#30Cool! I'd love to know a bit more about the replication setup. I'm guessing they are doing async replication. > We added nearly 50 read replicas, while keeping replication lag near zero I wonder what those replication lag numbers are exactly and how they deal with stragglers. It seems likely that at any given moment at least one of the 50 read replicas may be lagging cuz CPU/mem usage spike. Then presumably that woul…
> would slow down the primary since it has to wait for the TCP acks
Other than keeping around more WAL segments not sure why it would slow down the primary?