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)

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.

The presentation describes crypto-related parameters of PostgreSQL configuration (both authentication and TLS-protection of the connection to DB) and what do they mean

Many of us know that it is MVCC that provides concurrency access to data in many relational databases that guarantee transactions consistency and isolation. But only deep understanding of the implementation of this mechanism in PostgreSQL allows us to better understand the processes in the database, to design the application logic and table structures to be the most effective in a high-load world. We'll take one of the processes in our product to understand how MVCC is implemented in PostgreSQL and we'll explain one of the peculiarity when seemingly unrelated activities can affect each other.