PgConf.Russia 2016

We'll discuss how does Linux work with virtual memory. The following topics will be covered: * x86-64 page table, context switch and page fault; * internals of virtual memory management (VMM) in Linux; * page eviction methods in Linux, page cache and anonymous pages; * huge and gigantic pages, transparent huge pages; * how mmap(2) works and what madvise(2), msync(2) etc. provide; * why large databases don't use mmap(2), but rather implement buffer pool on their own; * ans surely how to tune Linux VMM using sysctl.

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.

My experience of working with PostgreSQL has provided clear understanding of its main advantages, making us choose and recommend choosing it.
1. Beginning
2. Documentation
3. Community
4.1 Transactional DDL
4.2 WAL and True Physical Replication
4.3 Transactional Snapshot and True Logical Replication and PGQ
4.4 Exciting extensibility
5. Success