PgConf.Russia 2017

Citus allows you to distribute postgres tables across many servers. It extends postgres to transparently delegate or parallelise work across a set of worker nodes, enabling you to scale out the CPU and memory available for queries.

One year ago, we began a long journey to allow Citus to scale out another dimension: write throughput. With writes being routed through a single postgres node, write throughput in Citus was ultimately bottlenecked on the CPUs of a single node. Citus MX is a new edition of Citus which allows distributed tables to be used from from any of the nodes, enabling NoSQL-like write-scalability.

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.

I love complex knowledge domains, strong typing in applications, and 3NF, but I hate ORM. That is why I’ve been actively storing serialized structures in JSON fields (even before the JSON type was introduced). In this talk, I will tell you about some specifics of storing complex structures within DBMS fields, what problems can arise, and how to cushion the blow.

VIDEO