PgConf.Russia 2016

Currently, PostgreSQL uses the interpreter to execute SQL-queries. This yields an overhead caused by indirect calls to handler functions and runtime checks, which could be avoided if the query were compiled into the native code "on-the-fly" (i.e. JIT-compiled): at a run time the specific table structure is known as well as data types used in the query. This is especially important for complex queries, which performance is CPU-bound. At the moment there are two major projects that implement JIT-compilation in PostgreSQL: a commercial database Vitesse DB and an open-source project PGStorm. The former uses LLVM JIT to achieve up to 8x speedup on selected TPC-H benchmarks, while the latter JIT-compiles the query using CUDA and executes it on GPU, which allows to speed up execution of specific query types by an order.

Our work is dedicated to adding support for SQL query JIT-compilation to PostgreSQL using LLVM compiler infrastructure. In the presentation we'll discuss how JIT-compilation can be used to speed up various stages of query execution in PostgreSQL, and the specifics of translating an SQL query into LLVM bitcode to achieve good performing native code. Also we'll present preliminary results for our JIT-compiler on TPC-H benchmark.

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.

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.