PGConf.Russia 2018

It’s 3am. Your phone rings. PostgreSQL is down, you need to promote a replica to master. Why the h**l isn’t this automatic?

If you thought of this before, you want automatic High Availability (HA). Don’t miss this talk! We will enter the world of Modern PostgreSQL HA.

Good news, there are several new, “modern” solutions for PostgreSQL HA. However, there are several solutions and it's not easy to pick one. Most require non-trivial setups, and there are many small caveats about HA like how to provide entry points to the application, HA correctness, HA vs. read scaling, external dependencies, interaction with cloud environments, and so forth.

Join this talk to master PostgreSQL HA and how to deploy it on current times.

WAL-G is simple and effective disaster recovery tool for PostgreSQL using cloud storages. In its core functionality, WAL-G is the successor of WAL-E rewritten in Go. But there is one new neat feature - delate-backups. WAL-G delta-backups, whenever possible, stores only pages, changed since the previous backup. In this talk, I'm going to describe development process of this feature.

Surprisingly, most important and complicated question was the design of the interface: WAL-e is simple and comprehensive, keeping these properties was goal #1. Technical details of implementation were covering some underwater stones too. Besides these, I want to discuss the perspective of technological development and future coordination of recovery tools developers.

Transition tables, a new feature in PostgreSQL 10, offer broad new capabilities including new ways to maintain materialized views. At the end of this talk, you will have seen new ways to use this feature and have it in your tool chest for the future.

This talk will compare architectural decisions that are made in PostgreSQL vs. ORACLE and will provide a closer look at the following components of both DBMSs:

1. The ins and outs of the working DBMS, its processes and their function
2. Structures that DBMS manages
3. Durability mechanics of each respective DBMS
4. MVCC design and database restoration options
5. Storage of data on the physical media

Each architectural decision will be evaluated based on the experience with DBMS of choice, ease of administration and future improvement possibilities.

This review will demonstrate the notable strengths of PostgreSQL as an open-source DBMS compared to the commercial solution in many cases.

This talk will be interesting for:

• PostgreSQL users, as it will allow to take a closer look into an alternative DBMS;
• PostgreSQL administrators, that will be able to see huge administration possibilities that ORACLE offers and that could be adopted in PostgreSQL;
• PostgreSQL hackers, as Postgres is being actively developed and this talk will review new development segments;
• Those who are willing to migrate from ORACLE (or any other commercial DBMS) into an open-source project, as this talk will show the features of PostgreSQL compared to the commercial product.