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.

In the pitch I will talk about the most important nuances of deployment and operations of the distributed analytical open-source database based on PostgreSQL - Greenplum. I will analyze the typical mistakes in its use, give the best practices and warn about bottlenecks.

It's not a secret for anyone that statistics can not be transferred with a major upgrade. For small and not heavily loaded databases this is not a problem, you can quickly collect new statistics. But we have databases with a volume of about 5TB and a load of about 100k rps, for which it became a big problem: taking off without statistics, the replicas could not even replay WAL. In my report I'll tell you what tricks we went to upgrade these databases with requirements of 100% read only availability, about what mistakes were made, and about how these errors were painfully corrected. The result of these errors was the extension called "pg_dirty_hands", in which we will collect various hacks, which can be last resort to repair data corruption.

"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)