PgConf.Russia 2017

Most of the main Skype services use a database platform based on PostgreSQL and other open-source technologies, such as Skytools, plProxy, pgBouncer, etc. This platform consists of several hundreds of servers with thousands of databases, which process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, the platform architecture allows its users (applications and their developers) to work with "logical" databases, without any worries about their real “physical” structure.

Our Skype Database Platform team is responsible for the database platform infrastructure. We develop automation systems for various processes that help us ensure service reliability and facilitate development, testing, and deployment of code. In this presentation, I will outline the database platform architecture, review its main components, and tell you about the methods we use in our every-day work to ensure high availability, scalability, replication, fault tolerance, and more.

MongoDB is a successful database in the NoSQL space, mostly used for OLTP-type workloads. However, due to the lack of ACID (transactions in particular) and significant performance issues with OLAP/DW workloads, more and more MongoDB users are considering migrating off of MongoDB to a RDBMS, where PostgreSQL is the usual choice. This represents a significant opportunity for the PostgreSQL ecosystem, to "bring NoSQL to SQL". This talk will present the challenges that MongoDB users are facing and the state of the art of the available tools and open source solutions available to perform ETL and live migrations to PostgreSQL. In particular, ToroDB Stampede will be discussed, an open source solution that replicates live from MongoDB, transform JSON documents into relational tables, and stores the data in PostgreSQL.

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