PgConf.Russia 2016

We love to stress test software, since we are a performance engineering company. Our friends from a hosting company servers.com provided us with a modern dedicated server so we immediately started to test PostgreSQL in different environments, including SmartOS, DragonFly and Windows. We would like to present our results (and all the gory details) to community.

Heroku Postgres is a cloud database service and the largest provider of PostgreSQL as a service anywhere. We operate more than 1,000,000 PostgreSQL databases with a team of about 10 people. We may be the most efficient DBAs in history, with approximately 100,000 databases per person on our team! This talk will introduce the opportunity and challenges of building and operating a cloud database service, as well as discussing the strategies we use to build, operate, and scale this product and team for the last six years now. We will include details about * a brief introduction to the service to provide context * strategies to design and build such a data service * operational war stories like how to recover from losing thousands of servers at once, * common challenges users have with Postgres * and a basic overview of the technical architecture

This is a complementary talk to Will Leinweber's talk, which will go into much more depth on the architecture of the software we have written.

CitusDB is an extension for PostgreSQL that can distribute tables across a cluster of PostgreSQL servers. Data is stored in shards that can use append-partitioning for bulk-loading of time series data or hash-partitioning for real-time data ingestion. SELECT queries on distributed tables are transparently parallelised across the cluster, using all available cores. Distributed tables can also be joined in parallel, even if they are not partitioned along the same column. CitusDB is especially suitable for real-time analytics use-cases such as dashboards which require fast analytical queries over live data, and can simultaneously act as a scalable operational database. This talk will describe the internals of CitusDB and give a live demo of a large-scale CitusDB cluster.