PgConf.Russia 2017

A short talk about collecting data and monitoring database workload in Avito. Exporting metrics from stored procedures to Graphite. Collecting and visualizing pg_stat* metrics in Grafana. Case studies.

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.

Database sharding enables a distribution of the database over a large number of machines, greatly improving performance. With the advent of Foreign Data Wrappers (FDW), it's possible to consider a database sharding in PostgreSQL with acceptable level of code changes using FDW. We've been working on enhancing around FDW infrastructure such as foreign table inheritance and pushing down so that PostgreSQL can execute the distributed query efficiently using FDW. In this talk, I'll cover what FDW-based sharding is and what use-cases it can cover. And then I'll demonstrate how to build sharding and describe our achievement of a FDW-based sharding in PostgreSQL community. Finally, I'll describe further enhancements to FDW such as Async Execution and Distributed Transaction Support.

This talk is intended for Oracle DBAs whose are considering to start using PostgreSQL as another RDBMS engine in their DB portfolio or for PostgreSQL DBAs, who wants to learn some of similarities and differences between Oracle and PostgreSQL. This talk is not intended to be a migration guideline neither advocating one platform over another. General database structure overview for both platforms will be compared in terms of memory configuration parameters; logical to physical structure as well as we’ll touch some security point of view and backup & recovery tools available. Oracle container databases are not covered. The talk want’s to help create a bridge for DBA and avoid some frustrations at the first Oracle DBA step to discover, learn and start using PostgreSQL as reliable fully functional database.

VIDEO