Database platform architecture and administrating PostgreSQL in Skype

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.

Processing 1 BILLION rows per second with PostgreSQL

Database systems are increasing in size and so is the need to process huge amounts of data in real time. As commercial database vendors are bragging about their capabilities we decided to push PostgreSQL to the next level and exceed 1 billion rows per second to show what we can do with Open Source. To those who need even more: 1 billion rows is by far not the limit - a lot more is possible. Watch and see how we did it.

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Test environment on demand

Do you test your PostgreSQL releases prior to Production in a dedicated test environment? Are you sure that your test environment (shortly Test) is equal to Production and in an appropriate state?

In Skype we were facing multiple challenges associated with database testing:
- Simplifying complex Production architecture of thousands of PostgreSQL instances, interconnected with RPCs and replications, infrastructure servers and external DB scripts, into their Test counterparts.
- Constantly growing hardware requirements, insufficient cleanup of data generated in Test.
- Differences between Test and Production were appearing and accumulating. Recognizing and fixing them required lots of effort.

ZSON, PostgreSQL extension for transparent JSONB compression

ZSON is a PostgreSQL extension for transparent JSONB compression. Compression is based on a shared dictionary of strings most frequently used in specific JSONB documents (not only keys, but also values, array elements, etc). In some cases ZSON can save half of your disk space and give you about 10% more TPS.

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