PgConf.Russia 2016

When new versions of Postgres are released most of the attention is focused on new features. Inevitably a release note claiming speed improvements seems relatively mundane and doesn't provide the compelling argument for upgrading. However the reality is that these speed improvements represent pain points that have been identified and solved.

Reviewing the changes to the sort code in Postgres over the last 10 years clearly shows the kinds of problems users have run into. As usage patterns changed over years, databases scaled up, and hardware changed new problems arose and drove further development to solve them.

Upcoming changes in 9.5 and 9.6 will dramatically change the experience further. Making sorting UTF8 and other encodings less of a problem and handling scaling to larger machines with many processors and memory cache more effectively.

Architecture features of IBM Power 8 allowing to gain high performance in comparison with x86_64. CPU, memory, IO etc. Experience of real benchmarking.

Enterprises need enterprise-level databases. The existing Postgres clustering solutions are not supported by the community. Postgres needs a community-supported cluster solution. There have been multiple attempts like Postgres-XC/XL, but they are still being developed separately and have low chance to be accepted by the community. Other solutions, like pg_shard, plproxy, FDW-based, etc. lack the notion of global transactions. We developed a Distributed Transaction Manager (DTM) as a Postgres extension to achieve global consistency over a number of Postgres instances. To demonstrate the capabilities of the DTM we present examples of distributed transaction processing using pg_shard and postgres_fdw. We hope that the proposed approach will be included into Postgres 9.6. This will make the development of the clustering solutions easier for all interested parties.

The Korean PostgreSQL User Group has been relatively small and inactive for many years. However, recently things are changing in Korea. Companies are seeking to alternatives for their expensive proprietary RDBMS in order to cut their TCO. And the government institutes also participate in this trend. We, Bitnine, are leading these changes in Korea. We launched the first version of our PostgreSQL solution, Agens SQL in 2015. We are translating the PostgreSQL documentation into Korean and operating the PostgreSQL User Group. And we are trying to contribute the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. Also, the first Korean PostgreSQL Conference will be hold in 2016. We will lead the organization of this conference. In this talk, we will present the current status of the Korean PostgreSQL User Group and the PostgreSQL DBMS market in Korea. And we also present our activities in Korea and introduce our successful migration cases of the proprietary RDBMS into PostgreSQL.