PGConf.Russia 2018

"And telling GIN from SP-GIST was quite beyond his wit, we found", said the classic. Can you? This masterclass is about not-so-often used index types (compared to conventional B-tree) which however can do a great job for you. We will look into internal mechanics of these indexes and discuss cases where they can be successfully applied. Also we will talk about some peculiarities of PostgreSQL index access. To spend time efficiently, listeners are required to have basic knowledge of PostgreSQL and should be used to read plans of simple queries.

Materials of the master class

• Slides
• Demo 1
• Demo 2
• Demo 3

Backup copy of the database with demo data can be downloaded here:

• Recovery with pg_restore (338 MB)

Pluggable storages is hot subject in PostgreSQL development. The period of heated debates about whether we need them is over. Skepticism about pluggable storages, based on concern that they may be source of inconsistent behavior, was weakened after criticism of PostgreSQL MVCC implementation from Uber side. It became widely understandable that pluggable storages are needed at least for an alternative MVCC implementation. And that is one of way-points for pluggable storages interface design.

At the moment, work on pluggable storages is in the practical stage. There is a thread is pgsql-hackers where few people are developing patchset and several people are doing review.

This talk will cover following subjects:

• overview of pluggable storages interface;
• changes in PostgreSQL core required to implement this interface;
• current and potential implementations of pluggable storages including heap with undo-log and in-memory OLTP engine;
• current state of patchset and prospective of its commit
• further development of interface allowing more possibilities in pluggable storages (columnar, index-organized, LSM and so on).

How to optimize query processing in PostgreSQL? What if we deal with hundreds of servers and thousands of instances? The company "Tensor" has developed a special tool - explain.sbis.ru, which enables synchronous collection and analysis of queries, visualization of implementation plans, and monitoring of bugs in database.

This report is about my PostgreSQL extension pg_profile. This extension all you need to create periodic statistics snapshots and to keep them. You can build a report on one or many serial snapshots. This report will contain statistics information about database workload in specified time period. It is very useful to start investigation on performance degragation or excessive resoure consumption in the past.