PgConf.Russia 2019

Software applications working on PostgreSQL is a very typical case in my practice. Some of them manage to work well, some of them do not. In the talk I will focus on errors and problems of the last ones.

Gallery

Declarative partitioning was a long-awaited feature and has been enhanced since its introduction in PostgreSQL 10. However, for many users, finding optimal partitioning schemes to have the best benefits from partitioning is not an easy task. Therefore, we added in HypoPG a new hypothetical partitioning feature which helps users to design partitioning. In this presentation, I will provide a brief introduction of HypoPG and explain declarative partitioning, and then I'll show the usage of hypothetical partitioning feature and explain how the extension is working.

Shared_buffers = 25% – is it too much or not enough? Or it's the right value?

How can we ensure that this – pretty much outdated – recommendation suit well our needs?

It is time to start apply enterprise-level approach to tuning postgresql.conf. Not using various blind auto-tuners or advices from old articles and blog posts, but based on the following two aspects:

1. comprehensive database experiments, conducted in automated fashion, repeated multiple times in conditions as close to production as possible, and
2. deep understanding of DBMS and OS internals.

Using Nancy CLI (https://gitlab.com/postgres.ai/nancy) we will consider a concrete example: infamous shared_buffers, under various circumstances, in various projects. We will try to figure out, how to optimize this settings for given infrastructure, database, and workload.

At the end of 2018, I've got a request to extend the syntax of the ltree contrib. I'm finalizing the patch and going to speak about:

• the current state of the extension,
• the extended syntax, and
• the process of development and testing the extension.