PGConf.Russia 2018

It’s 3am. Your phone rings. PostgreSQL is down, you need to promote a replica to master. Why the h**l isn’t this automatic?

If you thought of this before, you want automatic High Availability (HA). Don’t miss this talk! We will enter the world of Modern PostgreSQL HA.

Good news, there are several new, “modern” solutions for PostgreSQL HA. However, there are several solutions and it's not easy to pick one. Most require non-trivial setups, and there are many small caveats about HA like how to provide entry points to the application, HA correctness, HA vs. read scaling, external dependencies, interaction with cloud environments, and so forth.

Join this talk to master PostgreSQL HA and how to deploy it on current times.

PostgreSQL looks very competitive with other mainstream databases on OLTP workload (execution of large number of simple queries). But on OLAP queries, requiring processing of larger volumes of data, DBMS-es oriented on analytic queries processing can provide an order of magnitude better speed. The following factors limit Postgres OLAP performance:

• Unpacking tuple overhead (tuple_deform)
• Interpretation overhead (Postgres executor has to interpret query execution plan)
• Abstraction penalty (support of abstract data types)
• Pull model overhead (operators are pulling tuples from heap page one-by-one, resulting numerous repeated accesses to the page)
• MVCC overhead (extra per-tuple storage + visibility check cost)

All this issues can be solved using vectorized executor, which proceed bulk of values at once. In this presentation I will show how vector operations can be implemented in Postgres as standard Postgres extension, not affecting Postgres core. The approach is based on introducing special types: tile types, which can be used instead of normal (scalar) types and implement vector operations. Postgres extension mechanism, such as UDT (user-defined type), FDW (foreign data wrappers), executor hooks are used to let users work with vectorized tables almost in the same way as with normal tables. But more than 10 times faster because of vector operations.

If you honestly evaluate most of our business applications, you will see that they first collect and import the data into a database and then send the same data in the opposite direction.

What if we don't build an ORM wall between the application and the database, but try using the symbiosis of their strong points and special features instead?

I will tell you how we use PostgreSQL and Clojure for building data-intensive medical applications. We will cover the following topics:

• functional relational programming
• jsonb for modeling complex data domains
• functional indexes and json-knife extension for jsonb search
• graphql implementation on PostgreSQL
• logical replication for building reactive integrations
• asynchronous JDBC-free connector to PostgreSQL on netty

Bringing the provability and immutability of blockchain to performance and efficiency of traditional DBMS.

Blockchain technology has several unique properties including provability and immutability. Every blockchain transaction is signed by its author, and it could be verified by any blockchain network member. Also, once data is stored in blockchain, it can't be altered in the future. Many databases operating traditional DBMS would also benefit from provability and immutability properties. However, inclusion of all the transaction data in the public blockchain is very expensive.

Credereum is the platform, which allows creation and maintaining of databases, whose contents and history are provable and immutable without sacrifice the performance and efficiency of traditional DBMS. Thanks to Credereum, database owner can prove the validity of query results, while users can verify them. Database owner don't have to reveal the whole database contents or full history of transactions to provide the proof of database query results. Therefore, Credereum database may contain private sensitive information. Credereum utilized bleeding-edge technologies including, but not limited to decentralized cloud, public blockchain with sharding. Credereum is an emerging technology of trusted and private databases.

We will explain why PostgreSQL is suitable database for Credereum and what we need to develop in Postgres to support signed transactions and cryptographic storage.