PgConf.Russia 2016

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.

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.

Currently, PostgreSQL uses the interpreter to execute SQL-queries. This yields an overhead caused by indirect calls to handler functions and runtime checks, which could be avoided if the query were compiled into the native code "on-the-fly" (i.e. JIT-compiled): at a run time the specific table structure is known as well as data types used in the query. This is especially important for complex queries, which performance is CPU-bound. At the moment there are two major projects that implement JIT-compilation in PostgreSQL: a commercial database Vitesse DB and an open-source project PGStorm. The former uses LLVM JIT to achieve up to 8x speedup on selected TPC-H benchmarks, while the latter JIT-compiles the query using CUDA and executes it on GPU, which allows to speed up execution of specific query types by an order.

Our work is dedicated to adding support for SQL query JIT-compilation to PostgreSQL using LLVM compiler infrastructure. In the presentation we'll discuss how JIT-compilation can be used to speed up various stages of query execution in PostgreSQL, and the specifics of translating an SQL query into LLVM bitcode to achieve good performing native code. Also we'll present preliminary results for our JIT-compiler on TPC-H benchmark.

Whenever multiple users, processes, or threads are concurrently modifying data which is shared among them, problems can occur if race conditions are not handled somehow. These problems are particularly acute in a database which provide ACID semantics. A set of changes grouped into a database transaction must appear atomically, both to concurrent transactions and in terms of crash recovery. Each transaction must move the database from one consistent state (with regard to business rules) to another. For programming efficiency, each transaction must be able to be coded independently of what other transactions may happen to be running at the same time. In the event of a crash, all modifications made by transactions for which the application was notified of successful completion, and all modifications which had become visible to other transactions, must still be completed upon crash recovery. Over the years, various strategies have been employed to provide these guarantees, and sometimes the guarantees have been compromised in one way or another. This talk will cover the approaches taken to provide these guarantees or compromised variations of them, with an emphasis on the Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) technique available in PostgreSQL (and so far not in any other production product). While SSI already performs faster and with higher concurrency than any other technique for managing race conditions with most common workloads, there are many opportunities for further enhancing performance, some of which would require the assistance of people expert in the various index access methods; these issues will be discussed. The talk will also present some rough ideas about how SSI techniques might be used with XTM in a distributed system.

Time will be reserved at the end of the talk for group discussion of optimizations and possible application in distributed environments.