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.

Patroni is a Python application to create high-availability PostgreSQL clusters based on the streaming replication. It is used by Red Hat, IBM Compose, Zalando and many other companies. This tutorial will highlight Patroni architecture, provide attendees with hands-on experience of configuring high-availability PostgreSQL clusters with Patroni, describe how to take advantage of numerous additional features and give an opportunity to learn more about common mistakes related to running Patroni and its troubleshooting.

In order to take most out of the Patroni tutorial one needs a laptop with git, vagrant and virtual box installed.

Vagrant can be obtained from https://www.vagrantup.com Virtualbox is at https://www.vagrantup.com

Alternatively, one can install your Linux distribution packages (or use homebrew on Mac).

Once Vagrant and Virtualbox are installed one can run the Patroni VM by issuing the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/alexeyklyukin/patroni-training
$ cd patroni-training
$ vagrant up

When the setup concludes Patroni box can be accessed via ssh using vagrant ssh command.

"And telling GIN from SP-GIST was quite beyond his wit, we found", said the classic. Can you? This masterclass is about not-so-often used index types (compared to conventional B-tree) which however can do a great job for you. We will look into internal mechanics of these indexes and discuss cases where they can be successfully applied. Also we will talk about some peculiarities of PostgreSQL index access. To spend time efficiently, listeners are required to have basic knowledge of PostgreSQL and should be used to read plans of simple queries.

Materials of the master class

• Slides
• Demo 1
• Demo 2
• Demo 3

Backup copy of the database with demo data can be downloaded here:

• Recovery with pg_restore (338 MB)

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.