citus

| **<br/>The Citus database is 100% open source.<br/><img width=1000/><br/>Learn what's new in the [Citus 14 release blog](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2026/02/17/distribute-postgresql-18-with-citus-14/) and the [Citus Updates page](https://www.citusdata.com/updates/).<br/><br/>**|
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## What is Citus?

Citus is a [PostgreSQL extension](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/10/25/what-it-means-to-be-a-postgresql-extension/) that transforms Postgres into a distributed database—so you can achieve high performance at any scale.

With Citus, you extend your PostgreSQL database with new superpowers:

- **Distributed tables** are sharded across a cluster of PostgreSQL nodes to combine their CPU, memory, storage and I/O capacity.
- **Reference tables** are replicated to all nodes for joins and foreign keys from distributed tables and to maximize read performance.
- **Distributed query engine** routes and parallelizes SELECT, DML, and other operations on distributed tables across the cluster.
- **Columnar storage** compresses data, speeds up scans, and supports fast projections, both on regular and distributed tables.
- **Query from any node** enables you to utilize the full capacity of your cluster for distributed queries

You can use these Citus superpowers to make your Postgres database scale-out ready on a single Citus node. Or you can build a large cluster capable of handling **high transaction throughputs**, especially in **multi-tenant apps**, run **fast analytical queries**, and process large amounts of **time series** or **IoT data** for **real-time analytics**. When your data size and volume grow, you can easily add more worker nodes to the cluster and rebalance the shards.

Our [SIGMOD '21](https://2021.sigmod.org/) paper [Citus: Distributed PostgreSQL for Data-Intensive Applications](https://doi.org/10.1145/3448016.3457551) gives a more detailed look into what Citus is, how it works, and why it works that way.

![Citus scales out from a single node](