What OpenAI’s PostgreSQL Choices Reveal About Pragmatic Scaling

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OpenAI recently shared details on how they scale PostgreSQL to power ChatGPT for over 800 million users. When you hear numbers like that, you probably imagine a complex, distributed, sharded database architecture. You might expect them to be using something like Spanner, CockroachDB, or Cassandra.

The reality is surprisingly simple: They use a single Postgres primary with nearly 50 read replicas.

It sounds counter-intuitive. How does a single database node handle traffic for one of the most popular apps in the world? The answer provides a fascinating look at how real-world systems evolve versus how we design them on a whiteboard.

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