PgConf.Russia 2019

The first training course "DBA1. PostgreSQL Administration. Basic Course" was introduced by Postgres Professional in September 2015. The course was based on the then up-to-date version of PostgreSQL 9.4. A set of new courses has been introduced since then. In turn, the PostgreSQL database didn't stand still either.

The report will present the current line of courses for administrators and application developers. We will also show the roadmap for the near future, which includes specialist certification.

JSONB in PostgreSQL has interesting properties for design and development of business systems with heavy domain, helping to fight against complexity and variability. We will discuss the trade-offs of the JSONB approach. Using an open source project for Health IT - fhirbase we will:

• load synthetic medical data into PostgreSQL
• learn how to search and index this data (gin, jsquery, json-knife)
• use JSON aggregation to build complex queries (GraphQL)
• see how this data can be modified and validated
• discuss architecture consequences of JSONB usage

Technical requirements:

• docker
• docker-compose

Detailed prerequisites

This case study walks participants through a case where we decided to embark on a data recovery effort. This talk is applicable to all users, from novices to advanced PostgreSQL database administrators. Beginners will get an understanding of what data recovery is and is not, what expectations to have going into it, and how to work with contracted experts in order to ensure the best possible outcome, while more advanced users and experts will also get a fair bit out of the technical aspects of the case study.

While the talk will emphasize non-technical operational aspects of data recovery, it will also include discussions of the internals of PostgreSQL we had to work with, as well as how we went about approaching difficulties so that we could retrieve the data we hoped to.

You just set up your first PostgreSQL cluster, created a database schema, loaded some data, did some fine tuning of configuration. Now you want to make your cluster highly available. Unfortunately, PostgreSQL doesn't offer built-in automatic failover, but luckily for us, there are plenty of external tools for that. As a next logical step you start choosing a tool, and... you already doing it wrong, because first you have to define SLA, RTO, and RPO. In this talk I am going to cover most of the common mistakes people do when setting up a highly available cluster.