PgConf.Russia 2017

Modern state of backup tools for PostgreSQL certainly leaves some room for improvements. Standard utilities provides only basic functionality, third-party tools solve some, but not all, problems. To take backups reliably, fast, and incrementally on page level, one needs not only a backup tool, but also some support from the database server. On this tutorial we will talk about our new backup and recovery manager ProBackup, and will show it in action.

Demonstration script:

• pg_probackup_script.txt

This tutorial is about various applied JSON usage patterns and the related PostgreSQL functionality. We will discuss data storage in the JSON format, retrieving, changing, and searching such data, JSON features for simple SQL queries, as well as using JSON in stored procedures in different languages. You’ll get hands-on experience with some of the discussed problems on the provided virtual machines.

Full text search in PostgreSQL is probably the most advanced one among relational DBMS. This tutorial will explain how to setup full text search configurations and dictionaries and how to build a ful text search system using an example of a simple popular science web site, with demonstration of various ranking functions. Also I will tell about new RUM index, which allows to accelerate execution of some kinds of full text queries and implements a new improved ranking function.

Input-output (IO) performance issues have been on DBAs’ agenda since the beginning of databases. The volume of data grows rapidly and time is of an essence when one needs to get necessary data fast from the disk and, more importantly, to the disk.

For most databases it is relatively easy to find checklist of recommended Linux settings to maximize IO throughput and, in most cases, this checklist is indeed good enough. It is however essential always to understand how the optimisation of those settings actually works, especially, if you run into corner cases.