Data Engineering

Postgres at Scale: Sharding, Read Replicas, and Connection Pooling Strategies

5 min read

When to add a replica, when to shard, when to switch tools.

  1. 01Stage 1: One Postgres + PgBouncer (transaction pooling)

    Carries you to ~5K TPS.

  2. 02Stage 2: Read replicas + read/write split

    Carries you to ~25K TPS.

  3. 03Stage 3: Sharding via Citus or app-level keying

    Required past ~50K TPS or 5TB working set.

  4. 04Stage 4: Off-Postgres for hot paths (DynamoDB, ScyllaDB)

    When predictable single-key access dominates.

Compliance-Grade RAG PipelineSOC 2 + audit-trail architectureDocuments14K pagesChunkingHierarchicalEmbeddingsVoyage-3pgvectorOn RDSRerankCohere v3Claude 3.7Citation-disciplinedAUDIT TRAIL · Every query → S3 Object Lock · 7-year retentionQuestion · Retrieved chunks (hashed) · Prompt version · Model version · Final answerZero audit findings · Q1 2026 SOC 296.4% answer satisfaction · 2,400+ queries/month · p95 retrieval 180ms
The compliance-grade RAG architecture Ohveda deployed for a regulated FinTech in Q4 2025.

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