PgConf.Russia 2017

This talk is about migrating an electronic document management system from MS SQL to PostgreSQL 9.5 or higher as part of the import phaseout initiative. We will touch upon architecture specifics, as well as describe the problems we encountered when migrating T-SQL code to pgsql, and how we resolved them.

Learn more at https://pgconf.ru/news/94168

VIDEO

Do you test your PostgreSQL releases prior to Production in a dedicated test environment? Are you sure that your test environment (shortly Test) is equal to Production and in an appropriate state?

In Skype we were facing multiple challenges associated with database testing:
- Simplifying complex Production architecture of thousands of PostgreSQL instances, interconnected with RPCs and replications, infrastructure servers and external DB scripts, into their Test counterparts.
- Constantly growing hardware requirements, insufficient cleanup of data generated in Test.
- Differences between Test and Production were appearing and accumulating. Recognizing and fixing them required lots of effort.

When working with a complex business logic, you often have to implement a workflow - a sequence of several processing steps, with each step implementing a separate part of the business logic. This is usually done with specialized queues, but if there are high reliability demands, it makes sense to do everything on PostgreSQL.

I will describe the tasks that require a workflow implementation, offer a solution, compare it with other options, and tell you about the implementation traps and pitfalls.