PostgreSQL 17 Partitioning vs. Sharding Benchmarks: 2026 Horizontal Scaling for 10TB Databases

As 10TB+ PostgreSQL deployments become standard for enterprise workloads in 2026, teams face a critical choice for horizontal scaling: native table partitioning or distributed sharding. This article shares benchmark results comparing PostgreSQL 17’s native partitioning against Citus-powered sharding for 10TB datasets, using TPC-C (OLTP) and TPC-H (OLAP) workloads.

Horizontal Scaling Fundamentals for PostgreSQL

Horizontal scaling splits data across multiple storage units to avoid single-node hardware limits. PostgreSQL supports two primary approaches:

Partitioning : Native feature where a single table is split into smaller sub-tables (partitions) on the same database instance, using range, list, or hash partitioning.…