PGConf.Russia 2018

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.

The speaker will share his experience of transferring high-loaded game projects that were originally developed to work with MySQL into PostgreSQL. Problems that had been expected and ones that were actually faced. Tricky bugs that were found in production servers after the migration. Solutions that were used to deal with problems. PostgreSQL features that were very useful and desirable ones that were missing.

Last year we announced Skala-SR / Postgres Pro database machine with a hardware and software support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) as a key feature. The first appliances have been already installed at customer sites, and even with the first version customers got some constructions, that were impossible without RDMA and CPU offload (got with Mellanox networking). However, capabilities of this equipment are much wider, and this talk is dedicated to current works and prospective developments for this topic.