PostgreSQL was an easy early decision for the founding team. The relational data model fit the types of analyses they would be doing: filtering, grouping, joining, etc., and it was the database they knew best.

Shortly after adopting PG, they discovered Citus, which is a tool that makes it easy to distribute queries. Although it was a young project and a fork of Postgres at that point, Dan says the team was very available, highly expert, and it wouldn’t be very difficult to move back to PG if they needed to.

The stuff they forked was in query execution. You could treat the worker nodes like regular PG instances. Citus also gave them a ton of flexibility to make queries fast, and again, they felt the data model was the best fit for their application.

#DataStores #Databases

At Heap, we searched for an existing tool that would allow us to express the full range of analyses we needed, index the event definitions that made up the analyses, and was a mature, natively distributed system.

After coming up empty on this search, we decided to compromise on the “maturity” requirement and build our own distributed system around Citus and sharded PostgreSQL. It was at this point that we also introduced Kafka as a queueing layer between the Node.js application servers and Postgres.

If we could go back in time, we probably would have started using Kafka on day one. One of the biggest benefits in adopting Kafka has been the peace of mind that it brings. In an analytics infrastructure, it’s often possible to make data ingestion idempotent.

In Heap’s case, that means that, if anything downstream from Kafka goes down, we won’t lose any data – it’s just going to take a bit longer to get to its destination. We also learned that you want the path between data hitting your servers and your initial persistence layer (in this case, Kafka) to be as short and simple as possible, since that is the surface area where a failure means you can lose customer data. We learned that it’s a very good fit for an analytics tool, since you can handle a huge number of incoming writes with relatively low latency. Kafka also gives you the ability to “replay” the data flow: it’s like a commit log for your whole infrastructure.

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