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.

In addition to providing a general purpose web platform, Heroku has a large, supporting Postgres service. Over the years, we've learned a lot about running Postgres at scale.
In this talk, we'll cover:

• why Postgres is attractive to run as a cloud service
• how to provision, manage, and monitor a Postgres fleet
• tradeoffs needed to make Postgres work in this environment
• automating failure recovery
• and more

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.