PgConf.Russia 2016

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.

CitusDB is an extension for PostgreSQL that can distribute tables across a cluster of PostgreSQL servers. Data is stored in shards that can use append-partitioning for bulk-loading of time series data or hash-partitioning for real-time data ingestion. SELECT queries on distributed tables are transparently parallelised across the cluster, using all available cores. Distributed tables can also be joined in parallel, even if they are not partitioned along the same column. CitusDB is especially suitable for real-time analytics use-cases such as dashboards which require fast analytical queries over live data, and can simultaneously act as a scalable operational database. This talk will describe the internals of CitusDB and give a live demo of a large-scale CitusDB cluster.

Greenplum is a PostgreSQL fork, optimized for Analytics and Data Warehouse use cases. Pivotal announced in early 2015 that a number of products will go Open Source, one of them is Greenplum Database. This talk provides an overview over the history of Greenplum, the entire process of bringing the product into Open Source, all the stumbling blocks we ran into, and explains how contributors can participate.