tech Deep Dive
How OpenAI Scaled a Single PostgreSQL Instance to 800 Million ChatGPT Users: 50 Read Replicas, PgBouncer, Cascading Replication
OpenAI's ChatGPT database architecture is a single primary PostgreSQL instance with ~50 read replicas, PgBouncer connection pooling, and cascading replication on Azure. The core insight: read-heavy workloads don't need sharding — optimizing the read path is what matters.