PgConf.Russia 2016

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.

The talk describes performance benchmarking results of PostgreSQL on modern Hi-End servers. The main attention was paid to the locks for shared data access and associated bottlenecks. The testing propose was to test the linear read scalability limits with an increase of cores number allocated for PostgreSQL. Testing was performed for different postgres versions (9.4, 9.5, 9.6) to check new features designed to increase performance on multiprocessing architectures.

A backup is something that no Postgres deployments should go without as it gives the insurance to get back a deployment on its feet should a disaster strike.

In this talk we will discuss why backups are essential in any sane PostgreSQL deployments (this seems obvious) and what are the different options available to define and set up a good backup strategy. On top of that is discussed how the future of backups would need to be handled, particularly regarding differential backups that gain in popularity among users with large deployments.

B-tree is the most widely used index type in PostgreSQL. This data structure and concerned algorithms are developed about forty years ago. But there is still an area for optimisations. In this presentation I'm going to talk about B-tree data structure, and its features important for the optimal index usage. Furthermore, I'll present a couple of new features which are expected to be included in PostgreSQL 9.6 release.