PgConf.Russia 2017

Nowadays one can make a decent urban research based simply on public datasets, making interesting and unexpected insights. In the presentation, I'll show examples of these calculations in PostGIS, the industry standard de-facto.

But just PostGIS is not enough. You need tools to import, verify and visualize the data. It's critically important to visualize the data live, to debug your calculations and shorten iterations. I'll describe all these steps:

1. Collecting the data: public API, OpenStreetMap; direct user input.
2. 3rd party APIs for calculations.
3. Visualization of GIS and other sorts of data: QGIS, Matplotlib, Zeppelin integrated with PostGIS.
4. Debugging the calculations: live visualization (Arc, QGIS, NextGIS Web)
5. Scripting and minimizing the chores: Makefile, Gulp

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.

With big data threads, even the upload of data to a database can often be problematic – apart from the data upload itself, you need to create indexes, perform VACUUM after the upload for correct Index-only scans, etc. From this talk, you will learn how to avoid most of such problems (if not all of them).

VIDEO

1. Why is it time to consider switching to PostgreSQL?
2. 1С and PostgreSQL interoperability.
3. Why should we start with Windows?
4. The first experience of migrating big enough 1С databases to Postgres.
5. Large-scale projects on high-load systems, in figures.