PGConf.Russia 2018

Storing binary data in database tables is sometimes a good solution for a particular project. But sometimes, due to changes in conditions or insufficient consideration of decisions, such storage is becoming a real nightmare. If there is an understanding of how and where to place these data, the transition to the new solutions are often very hard, often require modification in the application code and downtime the system for migration. The presentation is a particular solution of such problems. Our extension allows to move binary data from database to the storage Ceph and not only. And does it seamless for the applications.

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.

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.