How Notion Handles 200 BILLION Notes (Without Crashing)

Notion has managed its rapid growth by adopting sharding to distribute its data across many smaller databases. Initially using a single Postgres database, they experienced slowdowns and shifted to sharding their block model. They later built their own data lake using AWS S3, Apache Spark, and other open-source tools to handle their data processing needs effectively. By reorganizing and scaling up their infrastructure, Notion maintained performance and avoided service interruptions for users.