Here's a 1-paragraph summary of the text: The author attempts to manually shard and scale a Postgres database, but ultimately finds that sharding data across multiple nodes can lead to inconsistencies and corruption, particularly when it comes to handling writes. In contrast, CockroachDB is designed to make horizontal scaling easy, with features like automatic rebalancing of data and built-in topology patterns for optimizing data placement. The author concludes that sharding a single table is not enough to achieve the complexity of horizontally scaling a database, and that leaving it to the database itself is the best approach.