PGConf.Russia 2018

Avito is the biggest classified site of Russia, and the third largest classified site in the world (after Craigslist of USA and 58.com of China). In Avito, ads are stored in PostgreSQL databases. At the same time, for many years already the logical replication is actively used. With its help, the following issues are successfully solved: the growth of data volume and growth of number of requests to it, the scaling and distribution of the load, the delivery of data to the DWH and the search subsystems, inter-base and internetwork data synchronization etc. But nothing happens "for free" - at the output we have a complex distributed system. Hardware failures can happen - it is natural - you need to be always ready for it. There is plenty of samples of logical replication configuration and lots of success stories about using it. But with all this documentation there is nothing about samples of the recovery after crashes and data corruptions, moreover there are no ready-made tools for it. Over the years of constantly using PgQ replication, we have gained extensive experience, rethought a lot, implemented our own add-ins and extensions to restore and synchronize data after crashes in distributed data processing systems. In this report, we would like to show how our experience can be shifted to a new logical replication subsystem in 10th version of PostgreSQL. In the current implementation, these are only non-trivial solutions - there is a number of issues for the community, that come down to implementing simple recovery mechanisms - as simple as configuring the replication in 10th version.

For the majority of System Administrators and DBAs performing an upgrade for RDBMS, let alone a major one, is a pain. That’s because one of the key factors that plays a role in a decision if and when to perform an upgrade is the downtime that it might come to during the process. This is true for any databases but especially important for those that are in production or under a high load.

Often, a major upgrade get’s cancelled and a DBA needs to go back to an older version due to the lack of experience or some basic errors that could have been easily avoided at the planning stage.

In our consultancy, we perform upgrades for our clients regularly and it allowed us to streamline the process and take some preventative measures that help us to perform it quickly, efficiently and with minimal or no downtime.

In this talk, I will share some key steps and tools that will help any DBA to become better at major upgrade performance. I will answer the following questions:

How to prepare for an upgrade of PostgreSQL? What one needs to do at the planning stage? How to plan your actions during the actual upgrade process? How to perform an upgrade successfully without going back to the older version? What actions one must perform following an upgrade?

I will also go through the two most popular processes of an upgrade: pg_upgrade и pg_dump/pg_restore, will compare some of the benefits and downfalls using each of these. I will also discuss some of the main issues one might face throughout the process and ways to avoid them.

This talk would be of interest to those who are new to PostgreSQL, as well as experienced DBAs who would like to learn more about upgrades or those who, in general, would like to understand why major upgrades should NOT be avoided like the plague.

For over 15 years JetBrains have strived to make effective developer tools. IntelliJ IDEA for java is the most popular of them. IntelliJ supports databases as well, and finally we in JetBrains decided to bring this functionality and our experience in programming languages to the world of SQL. That’s how DataGrip appeared. In my talk I will tell how DataGrip helps developers by automating routine checks and corrections and speeds up developer’s production. I will also show how to extend IDE’s functionality and try to understand which actual problems we can solve in future.

DBeaver is the Universal Databases Manager. We creating DBeaver using Open Source Software model. We pay special attention to the PotgreSQL because of its capabilities, popularity and OSS nature. We will talk about DBeaver evolution and structure, will demonstrate the basic functionality. We are going to cover challenges of PostgreSQL client creation. Also we will discuss requirements management model and interaction with the PostgreSQL community. We will show in details how to debug the PL/pgSQL stored procedures interactively. We are going to introduce some new features of the nearest DBeaver release and to share our plans.