PGConf.Russia 2018

For the majority of System Administrators and DBAs performing an upgrade for RDBMS, let alone a major one, is a pain. That’s because one of the key factors that plays a role in a decision if and when to perform an upgrade is the downtime that it might come to during the process. This is true for any databases but especially important for those that are in production or under a high load.

Often, a major upgrade get’s cancelled and a DBA needs to go back to an older version due to the lack of experience or some basic errors that could have been easily avoided at the planning stage.

In our consultancy, we perform upgrades for our clients regularly and it allowed us to streamline the process and take some preventative measures that help us to perform it quickly, efficiently and with minimal or no downtime.

In this talk, I will share some key steps and tools that will help any DBA to become better at major upgrade performance. I will answer the following questions:

How to prepare for an upgrade of PostgreSQL? What one needs to do at the planning stage? How to plan your actions during the actual upgrade process? How to perform an upgrade successfully without going back to the older version? What actions one must perform following an upgrade?

I will also go through the two most popular processes of an upgrade: pg_upgrade и pg_dump/pg_restore, will compare some of the benefits and downfalls using each of these. I will also discuss some of the main issues one might face throughout the process and ways to avoid them.

This talk would be of interest to those who are new to PostgreSQL, as well as experienced DBAs who would like to learn more about upgrades or those who, in general, would like to understand why major upgrades should NOT be avoided like the plague.

In this talk I will share the experience of migration, NoSQL data to a relational view convert, and tell you how we managed to speed up the application in 2 times.

Initially, we used PosgtgreSQL and MongoDB to store all the data. In practice, we found out that the separation is extremely inconvenient. We spent a lot of time and attention on it.

My talk will describe how we moved the data from MongoDB to PostgreSQL using mosql. As a result, all the data can be received by one query now, and the table schema ensures data consistency.

When one faces the issues with PostgreSQL, the main suspicion falls on vacuum. Experience of Data Egret team proves how many DBAs are attacking this rake. While there are tons of information, documentation and discussions on vacuum itself, the topic is still associated with a lot of myths, tales, horror stories and misconceptions. In my talk I will try to reveal the key points concerning the inner structure of vacuum, basic approaches to its adjustment and tuning, performance monitoring, and so on.

For over 15 years JetBrains have strived to make effective developer tools. IntelliJ IDEA for java is the most popular of them. IntelliJ supports databases as well, and finally we in JetBrains decided to bring this functionality and our experience in programming languages to the world of SQL. That’s how DataGrip appeared. In my talk I will tell how DataGrip helps developers by automating routine checks and corrections and speeds up developer’s production. I will also show how to extend IDE’s functionality and try to understand which actual problems we can solve in future.