citusdata / citusdata/citus_docs
Why use explicit `colocate_with` in create_distributed_table?
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Description
## Communication goals (e.g. detailed howto vs orientation)
We received a question in Slack where someone wants to know, "why use colocate_with in a situation where the default colocation group would work?"
### Good locations for content in docs structure
This section led to the question: https://docs.citusdata.com/en/v7.3/sharding/data_modeling.html#distributing-tables-by-tenant
## How does this work? (devs)
The benefits of colocate_with as I understand it:
* Makes the intention explicit, so Citus will error if the shard count setting has changed since distributing the original table.
* Ability to put tables in *different* colocation groups when their dist columns happen to be the same type but represent different concepts that are unlikely to be joined.
* I'm unsure whether this matches a common use case. Could reduce the overhead of the shard rebalancer thinking it needs to keep tables together when in fact it doesn't.
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