PgConf.Russia 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.