PgConf.Russia 2016

Alibaba has provided a relational database service (RDS) for postgres in our public cloud platform (aliyun.com, the currently biggest public cloud in China). We are also enabling internal applications to use postgres in our other internet business and we can share our experience

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.

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.

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.