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.

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?

VIDEO

VIDEO

The talk will describe how we have implemented storage of large tables (+1 billion rows per day). The project exists in production 2 years. The total amount of data - 300 Tb (25 PostgreSQL servers * 2 Data Center). I'll tell about mistakes in organization of large tables storage in the initial phase of the project, and how these mistakes were corrected. I'll also talk about how to organize the data rotation and archiving. I voiced questions about what we were missing in PostgreSQL 9.4 out of what appeared in the 9.5 and 9.6. And also, what new features we are waiting for new releases of PostgreSQL.