PGConf.Russia 2018

What is a real cost of not paying for Windows for 1C-user? Is there life without COM? Addressing and other issues for the bunch of PostgreSQL. Scheduling disk resources. How to overcome OS CentOS crash.

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.

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.

PostgreSQL looks very competitive with other mainstream databases on OLTP workload (execution of large number of simple queries). But on OLAP queries, requiring processing of larger volumes of data, DBMS-es oriented on analytic queries processing can provide an order of magnitude better speed. The following factors limit Postgres OLAP performance:

• Unpacking tuple overhead (tuple_deform)
• Interpretation overhead (Postgres executor has to interpret query execution plan)
• Abstraction penalty (support of abstract data types)
• Pull model overhead (operators are pulling tuples from heap page one-by-one, resulting numerous repeated accesses to the page)
• MVCC overhead (extra per-tuple storage + visibility check cost)

All this issues can be solved using vectorized executor, which proceed bulk of values at once. In this presentation I will show how vector operations can be implemented in Postgres as standard Postgres extension, not affecting Postgres core. The approach is based on introducing special types: tile types, which can be used instead of normal (scalar) types and implement vector operations. Postgres extension mechanism, such as UDT (user-defined type), FDW (foreign data wrappers), executor hooks are used to let users work with vectorized tables almost in the same way as with normal tables. But more than 10 times faster because of vector operations.