PGConf.Russia 2018

One of advantages of document-oriented databases like MongoDB or Couchbase over RDBMSs is an ability to change the data scheme easily, fast and often. The traditional approach in RDBMS world involves doing an expensive ALTER TABLE operation, slow upgrade of an existing data, and stuff like this. This approach is often slow and inconvenient for application developers.

To solve this issue PostgreSQL provides JSON and JSONB datatypes. Also there are extensions like zson and pg_protobuf. From this talk you will learn how to work with these datatypes and extensions, their pros and cons and also related future work in this area.

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.

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.