PgConf.Russia 2017

Streaming replication has been introduced in 2010 and quickly became one of the most popular features of PostgreSQL. Today, it is hard to imagine PostgreSQL installation without streaming replication. With its stability, high efficiency and ease of configuration one would have thought it is an optimal feature. However, while using it you might sometimes enter murky waters. This often can be resolved by using a combination of built-in and third party troubleshooting tools. In my talk I will provide an overview of these tools and explain how with their help one can diagnose, understand and eliminate problems related to streaming replication. I will also go through the most frequent issues occurring when streaming replication is used and will propose possible solutions. This talk is primarily aimed at DBAs and system administrators who use PostgreSQL in their day-to-day.

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The PostgreSQL community is over 20 years old, but the history of PostgreSQL dates back even farther. In this talk, we'll learn about the roots of the Postgres project, learn about some of the people who contribute to it, study how it has changed over time, and pay special attention to the many contributions of Russian people.

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.

It's not a secret that PostgreSQL connections are expensive so you should save them. To solve this problem there are PgPool-II and PgBouncer for quite a long time. At Yandex tens of thousands of connections to a single database is not a surprise so we use pgbouncer since time immemorial. This talk gives an overview of problems we faced and ways to solve them.

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