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.

Deadlock explanations

< Query failed: ERROR: deadlock detected
< DETAIL: Process 17371 waits for ShareLock on transaction 102733872; Blocked by process.
< Process 10414 waits for ShareLock on transaction 102733874; Blocked by process 17371.

Such "unpleasant" messages from the server can seriously puzzle the developer. When working with locks, in particular, with transactions in general, it is necessary to take into account the features of the implementation of client libraries, which can cause the above exception.

In the short talk, the mechanics of the interaction of locks will be explained, main attention being paid to causes of deadlocks. References to the relevant documentation pages will be given. A technique of "bypassing" this problem of concurrent data access will be described and illustrated with some generalized examples from practice are shown. The talk will be interesting to database developers and administrators as well as the client-side application developers.

temBoard a new tool for PostgreSQL

Dalibo team produces open source tools for PostgreSQL among other things for many years now (see http://dalibo.github.io/).

This time I'll present temBoard, a new tool to remotely control PostgreSQL databases. The project is visible at https://github.com/dalibo/temboard

It's about monitoring, supervision, remote settings and actions... and many more features to come. The main goal is to provide a comprehensive console for PostgreSQL. It's needed by production DBAs, to daily achieve their tasks. We heard Dalibo's customers, as many of them wrote the specs :-)

GiST speedup: patches, hacks and tweaks

This report overviews some ideas and implementations to speedup different parts of generalized search trees (GiST): 1. Intrapage indexing 2. Fractal tree technology 3. Modern algorithms for spatial indexing (RR*-tree) 4.. Possible advancements of GiST API

VIDEO