Case Study: Sportradar achieves sub‑second, 36× faster real‑time sports analytics with Citus Data

Sportradar’s Radar360 Powers Real-Time Sports Analytics Using the Citus Database

Sportradar’s Radar360 provides real‑time analytics to professional teams and media outlets that need millisecond‑level insights during live games. The challenge was to support highly dynamic, ad‑hoc queries with sub‑second responses so commentators and analysts get timely stats and scenario‑based analysis — a workload that ruled out data‑warehouse options like Redshift due to slow, variable query compile times.

Sportradar implemented Citus (a distributed extension to PostgreSQL) for sharding and parallel query execution, which eliminated the compile overhead and kept the team on standard Postgres. The result: ad‑hoc queries under one second, up to 36× faster than a single Postgres node in tests, faster time‑to‑market with minimal app changes, and horizontal scalability to handle 2–10× growth in data while powering analytics across 40+ sports.

Sportradar

Michael Moser

Head of Product Development