PgConf.Russia 2017

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.

Partitioning is a long-awaited feature in PostgreSQL. Although Postgres supports partitioning via inheritance, this approach has some disadvantages, such as the need to manually create partitions and support triggers, significant planning overhead, and no query execution optimizations. In this talk, we’ll tell you about the pg_pathman extension we are developing. pg_pathman supports HASH and RANGE partitioning, performs planning and execution optimizations, supports fast insert by using Custom Node instead of triggers, provides functions for partition management (add, split, merge, etc.), supports FDW, non-blocking data migration, and more. We'll also speak about pg_pathman integration with Postgres Pro Enterprise Edition and Oracle-like syntax support for partitioning. Finally, we'll discuss new partitioning capabilities in PostgreSQL 10, the already implemented features and further development plans.

VIDEO

Sets are apparently a useful data type for many kinds of applications. While PostgreSQL offers no built-in set data type, sets may be emulated to some degree with its built-in array and JSONB data types. Also, acceleration of respective containment (subset) queries is readily available as a built-in feature of the GIN index type.

Starting with the above, we will then explore the performance gains enabled by custom set data types, and especially by customisation code in C ("operator classes") for the GIN and GiST index types.

Often it is enforced by the customer or even by law, to document the circumstances of the production of parts or lots. This talk is about the automated generation and storage of the corresponding administrative data and their correlation to measurements. Administrative data are entities like suppliers batch, article, serial number or production date. They are often to be exchanged with ERP systems.