Get the latest tech news
Vertical Sharding Sucks
Apr 11th, 2025 Lev Kokotov Vertical sharding, sometimes called functional sharding, takes tables out of your main database and puts them somewhere else. Most of the time, it’s another Postgres database.
This reduces load on the main DB and gives your app some breathing room to grow. So if you have two completely separate databases, and your app can use one or the other (think replicas), your SLA is the probability of both of them failing at the same time: You start writing “services” that encapsulate these application-layer joins behind an HTTP (or gRPC) API, and you call them from multiple places in your app.
Or read this on Hacker News