OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level
At the PGConf.dev 2025 Global Developer Conference, Bohan Zhang from OpenAI shared OpenAI’s best practices with PostgreSQL, offering a glimpse into the database usage of one of the most prominen
Speaker here — Bohan from OpenAI. Our application has hundreds of endpoints, which makes sharding non-trivial. We've already offloaded shardable workloads—particularly write-heavy ones—from PostgreSQL. What remains is primarily read-only and would require substantial effort to shard. Currently, the workload scales well on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and we have sufficient headroom to support future growth.
That said, we're not ruling out sharding in the future—it’s just not a near-term priority.