PgConf.Russia 2016

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.

The talk describes performance benchmarking results of PostgreSQL on modern Hi-End servers. The main attention was paid to the locks for shared data access and associated bottlenecks. The testing propose was to test the linear read scalability limits with an increase of cores number allocated for PostgreSQL. Testing was performed for different postgres versions (9.4, 9.5, 9.6) to check new features designed to increase performance on multiprocessing architectures.

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.

In addition to providing a general purpose web platform, Heroku has a large, supporting Postgres service. Over the years, we've learned a lot about running Postgres at scale.
In this talk, we'll cover:

• why Postgres is attractive to run as a cloud service
• how to provision, manage, and monitor a Postgres fleet
• tradeoffs needed to make Postgres work in this environment
• automating failure recovery
• and more