PGConf.Russia 2018

Lately, the PostgreSQL is more widely being used for Enterprise. Our company, Ingram Micro Cloud, is one of the first companies that did it. We have been using PostgreSQL for many years as the main DBMS for our products. In our report, we want to tell about the evolution of our High Availability (HA) PostgreSQL cluster. We will tell about how quickly we implemented the solution using pgpool-II, wrote failover scripts, tested Postgres-XL, and came up with unusual configurations of Stolon. We will also cover the problems of load balancing, pooling connections, and backups.

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»

This report is about my PostgreSQL extension pg_profile. This extension all you need to create periodic statistics snapshots and to keep them. You can build a report on one or many serial snapshots. This report will contain statistics information about database workload in specified time period. It is very useful to start investigation on performance degragation or excessive resoure consumption in the past.

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.