PgConf.Russia 2016

Schema-less is definitely a trend in the data storage nowadays, and it's not only about NoSQL, but also about traditional RDBMS. Many relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, Oracle, db2, Mysql) allow to storing data in the schema-less json format and use their own more or less unique way to do that.

This talk contains two parts:

• Comparison of the json support in PostgreSQL and different relational databases, namely Mysql, Oracle, db2, MSSql in terms of supported features, functions and so on.
• Performance benchmarks for databases with the advanced json support, namely PostgreSQL and Mysql, and the MongoDB on different workload types and configurations.

Common Java wisdom is to use PreparedStatements and Batch DML in order to achieve top performance. It turns out one cannot just blindly follow the best practices. In order to get high throughput, you need to understand the specifics of the database in question, and the content of the data.

In the talk we will see how proper usage of PostgreSQL protocol enables high performance operation while fetching and storing the data. We will see how trivial application and/or JDBC driver code changes can result in dramatic performance improvements. We will examine how server-side prepared statements should be activated, and discuss pitfalls of using server-prepared statements.

Greenplum is a PostgreSQL fork, optimized for Analytics and Data Warehouse use cases. Pivotal announced in early 2015 that a number of products will go Open Source, one of them is Greenplum Database. This talk provides an overview over the history of Greenplum, the entire process of bringing the product into Open Source, all the stumbling blocks we ran into, and explains how contributors can participate.

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.