The history of Postgres sharding

This post provides a historical overview of database sharding, tracing its origins from video games to modern solutions like Vitess and Citus. It details early approaches such as application-level sharding (Facebook, YouTube), proxy-based solutions (PL/Proxy), and Postgres extensions (Citus). The post also discusses distributed SQL systems (Spanner, CockroachDB, Yugabyte) and their trade-offs compared to native Postgres sharding. It highlights the challenges and lessons learned throughout this evolution, which inform the development of new solutions like Neki.