PgConf.Russia 2017

Modern state of backup tools for PostgreSQL certainly leaves some room for improvements. Standard utilities provides only basic functionality, third-party tools solve some, but not all, problems. To take backups reliably, fast, and incrementally on page level, one needs not only a backup tool, but also some support from the database server. On this tutorial we will talk about our new backup and recovery manager ProBackup, and will show it in action.

Demonstration script:

• pg_probackup_script.txt

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.

The talk will describe how we have implemented storage of large tables (+1 billion rows per day). The project exists in production 2 years. The total amount of data - 300 Tb (25 PostgreSQL servers * 2 Data Center). I'll tell about mistakes in organization of large tables storage in the initial phase of the project, and how these mistakes were corrected. I'll also talk about how to organize the data rotation and archiving. I voiced questions about what we were missing in PostgreSQL 9.4 out of what appeared in the 9.5 and 9.6. And also, what new features we are waiting for new releases of PostgreSQL.

Dalibo team produces open source tools for PostgreSQL among other things for many years now (see http://dalibo.github.io/).

This time I'll present temBoard, a new tool to remotely control PostgreSQL databases. The project is visible at https://github.com/dalibo/temboard

It's about monitoring, supervision, remote settings and actions... and many more features to come. The main goal is to provide a comprehensive console for PostgreSQL. It's needed by production DBAs, to daily achieve their tasks. We heard Dalibo's customers, as many of them wrote the specs :-)