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.

Postgres has a nice feature called Point-in-time Recovery (PITR) that would allow you to go back in time. In this talk, we will discuss what are the use-cases of PITR, how to prepare your database for PITR by setting good base backup and WAL shipping setups, with some examples. We will expand the discussion with how to achieve PITR if you have a distributed and sharded Postgres setup by mentioning challenges such as clock differences and ways to overcome them, such as two-phase commit and pg_create_restore_point.

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.

This talk explores the ways attackers with no authorized database access can steal Postgres passwords, see database queries and results, and even intercept database sessions and return false data. Postgres supports features to eliminate all of these threats, but administrators must understand the attack vulnerabilities to protect against them. This talk covers all known Postgres external attack methods.