PGConf.Russia 2018

In this talk, I will tell you the story of how a bunch of sysadmins got sick of having to resuscitate their petabyte-sized Elasticsearch cluster and decided to replace it with some tried technologies: PostgreSQL, Kafka, a bit of Redis, lots of glue, and the typical sysadmin stubbornness. The result is Bagger: the sysadmin answer to Big Data. A fast, fairly reliable, fault-tolerant store, used mostly for logging timestamped events for some amount of time. Bagger is named the Bagger series of bucket-wheel excavators, feats of German engineering and some of the largest land vehicles ever produced by man. Just like the excavators that dig through tons of material, our Bagger digs through tons data.

Liquibase is a very convenient tool for sequential database migration, used both on our projects and in a large number of other projects and frameworks. It allows you to keep the code of the database together with the application code in VSC, track the attempts of repeated migrations and much, much more. But sooner or later the project grows, the data occupy terabytes, and liquibase still rolls the migration sequentially.

We could not afford to deploy migrations for 100 hours and came up with a framework for liquibase that expanded its capabilities and allowed to execute a whole series of scripts in parallel or to split one large migration into small partitions and migrate them in parallel.

PostGIS is a spatial extension to PostgreSQL that enables spatial datatypes, access methods and a set of functions to perform geometric operations on them.

Typically PostGIS is used to select a small subset of a big static dataset. In this talk I'll cover issues that arise when working with big dynamic data flows, and ways to resolve them, on examples that we've met developing Juno ride sharing service backend.

This talk explores the ways attackers with no authorized database access can steal Postgres passwords, see database queries and results, and even intercept database sessions and return false data. Postgres supports features to eliminate all of these threats, but administrators must understand the attack vulnerabilities to protect against them. This talk covers all known Postgres external attack methods.