PgConf.Russia 2016

The talk will be articulated around all the traditional arguments to "how chose PostgreSQL over other choices in the database domain"... But also, and that's quite new in the comunity, what are the consequences of this choice. Because the PostgreSQL adoption brings adoption of other things like Linux, but also, Open Source thinking, the fast pace of PostgreSQL will command new methods of validation the company must adapt to... etc.

PostgreSQL includes several index types: GiST, SP-GiST, GIN, and of course, the regular B-tree. DBAs are familiar with using each of these for specific use cases, GIN for full-text search, GiST for geometrical data, and so on, but how do they work internally? What makes them suitable for the cases they're typically used for?

In this presentation, I will walk through the internal structure of each of these index types, explaining what strengths and weaknesses each one of them have.

Enterprises need enterprise-level databases. The existing Postgres clustering solutions are not supported by the community. Postgres needs a community-supported cluster solution. There have been multiple attempts like Postgres-XC/XL, but they are still being developed separately and have low chance to be accepted by the community. Other solutions, like pg_shard, plproxy, FDW-based, etc. lack the notion of global transactions. We developed a Distributed Transaction Manager (DTM) as a Postgres extension to achieve global consistency over a number of Postgres instances. To demonstrate the capabilities of the DTM we present examples of distributed transaction processing using pg_shard and postgres_fdw. We hope that the proposed approach will be included into Postgres 9.6. This will make the development of the clustering solutions easier for all interested parties.