Postgres as BI platform core, features, practical experience

I will tell you about why Postgres is first-choice product as a foundation for your BI system with classical OLAP workload. Briefly it will be said about existing open source BI solutions.

I will also describe specific of our architecture, why we chose snowflake scheme and how we are doing extract, transformation and load procedures. It will be mentioned about special Postgres tuning for OLAP and massive data bulkload workloads. Also I will let you know about Postgres usage as a column database with cstore_fdw by Citus and results achieved. Cons and problems of our approach will be described in the end of the talk.

VIDEO

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.

Complex structures without ORM

I love complex knowledge domains, strong typing in applications, and 3NF, but I hate ORM. That is why I’ve been actively storing serialized structures in JSON fields (even before the JSON type was introduced). In this talk, I will tell you about some specifics of storing complex structures within DBMS fields, what problems can arise, and how to cushion the blow.

VIDEO

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 :-)