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.

Unlike most other databases, PostgreSQL is developed by a community, and not by a company or even a foundation. Those who have been members of this community for a long time generally consider this a strength, but it can often be confusing to outsiders who are more used to dealing with traditional organization. For those who are not already on the inside, this talk will give an introduction to how the PostgreSQL community works and how the different parties interact, as well as how this has evolved over the years.

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.

In late 2006, the 1C company has implemented to work 1C:Enterprise platform with DBMS PostgreSQL, which can operate under the operating systems Windows or Linux. The talks will attempt to summarize the experience of sharing the platform 1C:Enterprise with PostgreSQL database since 2008. Consideration will be given a few success stories, technical features of the work are examples of specific tasks, offers advice on selecting and cons. The talk may be of interest to employees of companies considering the option of using PostgreSQL for the 1C:Enterprise, DBA, professionals interested in the possibility of extensibility PostgreSQL.