How teams scaled PostgreSQL: 14 real case studies
14 of the 73 engineering write-ups in our database mention PostgreSQL in their stack. They come from 9 companies (Figma, Datadog, GitLab, Notion, Atlassian and 4 more) and were published between 2021 and 2026. Techniques that show up most often alongside PostgreSQL: connection pooling (3), horizontal sharding (3), read replicas (3) and benchmarking (2). It's often paired with AWS RDS (4), PgBouncer (3), Kubernetes (2) and Ruby on Rails (2). 7 of the 14 state concrete scale numbers, for example "118.5M QPS sustained for 16 minutes" (PlanetScale). Each card below links to our short summary and the original post.
118 million queries per second on Neki
PlanetScale benchmarked Neki, its sharded Postgres, with single-shard primary-key point selects. Targeting about 200K QPS per shard, it went from 5 shards (about 1M QPS) to 50 (9.9M QPS, per-shard rate within 0.8%) to 512 shards and 480 routers, sustaining 118.5M QPS for 16 minutes over 1.22 PiB with a p99 of 6.06 ms at the router and about one error per 1.8 million queries. PlanetScale notes the run was read-only, primary-only with no replicas, and had no failover during the measured window.
When failover isn't safe: Building high-availability PostgreSQL on Kubernetes
A gameday that injected network latency into one availability zone left several of Datadog's Kubernetes-based PostgreSQL clusters stuck: replicas lagged past Patroni's maximum_lag_on_failover, so no standby could be promoted safely. Datadog moved to a hybrid model: standbys in the leader pool take part in synchronous replication (one synchronous standby, synchronous_mode_strict, synchronous_commit=remote_apply) while read replicas stay asynchronous. pgbench showed remote_apply raised average latency by 53% and cut throughput by 34%, yet production clusters saw no measurable impact after a gradual rollout, and synchronous replication is now enabled in all of its clusters.
Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users
OpenAI runs ChatGPT on a single-primary Postgres with nearly 50 global read replicas. Reads are offloaded, write-heavy shardable workloads move to Cosmos DB, and PgBouncer, cache leasing and multi-layer rate limits keep the primary safe.
Migrating the Jira Database Platform to AWS Aurora
Atlassian migrated about four million Jira databases from RDS Postgres to Aurora, balancing reliability, downtime and cost.
Breaking up a monolith: How we're unwinding a shared database at scale
Datadog is splitting its large shared Postgres database into team-owned instances in three phases. Logical separation moves tables into about 30 private domain schemas with explicit ACLs, using query samples and interviews with 30+ teams. Access reduction routes services through per-team PG Proxies so ACLs can be narrowed safely, and physical separation replicates each schema to a managed OrgStore instance, moves reads first and then writes with under five seconds of downtime, and replicates back for rollback. Two workloads have fully migrated and more than 70 dead tables were deleted along the way.
How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale
Figma's nine-month effort to horizontally shard its Postgres stack using a custom query proxy and logical sharding before physical splits.
How We Scaled PostgreSQL to 350 TB+
Timescale dogfooded its own Postgres extension to build a database-observability product, using hypertables, columnar compression and tiered storage to keep a 350 TB+ dataset queryable.
Supavisor: Scaling Postgres to 1 Million Connections
Supabase load-tested Supavisor, its Elixir Postgres pooler, with a million client connections.
The Great Re-shard: adding Postgres capacity (again) with zero downtime
Notion tripled its Postgres fleet by re-sharding with logical replication and careful PgBouncer cutovers, with no downtime.
The growing pains of database architecture
How Figma moved from one Postgres instance to multiple databases by vertically partitioning table groups.
We are splitting our database into Main and CI
GitLab.com split CI tables into their own Postgres database to relieve its main database.
LiveGraph: real-time data fetching at Figma
Figma built LiveGraph, which tails the Postgres replication log so its UI can subscribe to live query results.
Herding elephants: Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion
Notion split its Postgres monolith into a fleet of logical shards keyed by workspace, using double-writes and backfills to migrate.
Why we spent the last month eliminating PostgreSQL subtransactions
GitLab traced replica stalls to Postgres subtransaction overflow and removed subtransactions from its code.