PgConf.Russia 2017

A summary of what the Postgres Professional company has achieved in its two-year history:

• Our achievements in PostgreSQL development.
• What is the Russian Postgres Pro DBMS, and how is it related to PostgreSQL?
• What is Postgres Pro Enterprise, and why Enterprise?
• What about trainings and certification?

VIDEO

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.

Sets are apparently a useful data type for many kinds of applications. While PostgreSQL offers no built-in set data type, sets may be emulated to some degree with its built-in array and JSONB data types. Also, acceleration of respective containment (subset) queries is readily available as a built-in feature of the GIN index type.

Starting with the above, we will then explore the performance gains enabled by custom set data types, and especially by customisation code in C ("operator classes") for the GIN and GiST index types.

Partitioning is a long-awaited feature in PostgreSQL. Although Postgres supports partitioning via inheritance, this approach has some disadvantages, such as the need to manually create partitions and support triggers, significant planning overhead, and no query execution optimizations. In this talk, we’ll tell you about the pg_pathman extension we are developing. pg_pathman supports HASH and RANGE partitioning, performs planning and execution optimizations, supports fast insert by using Custom Node instead of triggers, provides functions for partition management (add, split, merge, etc.), supports FDW, non-blocking data migration, and more. We'll also speak about pg_pathman integration with Postgres Pro Enterprise Edition and Oracle-like syntax support for partitioning. Finally, we'll discuss new partitioning capabilities in PostgreSQL 10, the already implemented features and further development plans.

VIDEO