PgConf.Russia 2017

It often happens that you already have PosgtreSQL in production, but you don’t have a DBA. To demystify the PostgreSQL database, I’ll tell you how to troubleshoot various problems while working with PosgtreSQL. We will try to understand how to answer "routine" questions of a typical system administrator: - Is everything OK with the database? - What consumes DB server resources? - What to optimize first to reduce resource consumption?

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Experience we've got after 5 years of developing, deploying and improving BI system http://colibri365.ru used in government. I would talk about government IT reality and our way over it. Postgres performance improvements, using of latest features, overwriting of user generated queries to help query optimizer and other tweaks and hacks to tackle limited hardware problems. These lead us to number of computer science papers and (now committed) patches to Postgres (see Andrey Borodin talks for details).

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Most of the main Skype services use a database platform based on PostgreSQL and other open-source technologies, such as Skytools, plProxy, pgBouncer, etc. This platform consists of several hundreds of servers with thousands of databases, which process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, the platform architecture allows its users (applications and their developers) to work with "logical" databases, without any worries about their real “physical” structure.

Our Skype Database Platform team is responsible for the database platform infrastructure. We develop automation systems for various processes that help us ensure service reliability and facilitate development, testing, and deployment of code. In this presentation, I will outline the database platform architecture, review its main components, and tell you about the methods we use in our every-day work to ensure high availability, scalability, replication, fault tolerance, and more.

I will tell you about why Postgres is first-choice product as a foundation for your BI system with classical OLAP workload. Briefly it will be said about existing open source BI solutions.

I will also describe specific of our architecture, why we chose snowflake scheme and how we are doing extract, transformation and load procedures. It will be mentioned about special Postgres tuning for OLAP and massive data bulkload workloads. Also I will let you know about Postgres usage as a column database with cstore_fdw by Citus and results achieved. Cons and problems of our approach will be described in the end of the talk.

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