PGConf.Russia 2018

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.

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.

Developers are often challenged to deliver results that are hard to implement using simple SQL queries. Fortunately, complex SQL capabilities exist in the SQL standards — common table expressions and window functions.

SQL is a declarative language, meaning the user submits an SQL command and the database determines the optimal execution. Common Table Expressions (CTEs) allow queries to be more imperative, allowing looping and processing hierarchical structures that are normally associated only with imperative languages.

Normal SQL queries return rows where each row is independent of the other returned rows. SQL window functions allow queries to return computed columns based on values in other rows in the result set.

This tutorial will help developers use CTE queries in their applications and allow operations that normally could only be done in application code to be done via SQL queries. It also explains the many window function facilities and how they can be used to produce useful SQL query results.

Video

Part I «Programming the SQL Way with CTE»

Part II «Postgres Window Magic»

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.