PgConf.Russia 2019

Reliable backup and recovery, at enterprise level for the PostgreSQL environment. No more traditional backups. CBT (Change Block Tracking) technology is the next generation incremental backup. Faster than snapshots, CBT back up blocks that change, not all of your data, reducing server and network traffic and eliminating the need for traditional backups. Benefits: • Data protection mode close to Real-Time • Update with ease

As any ordinary software developers, we just pursued a goal to develop a system robust for high loads, and even succeeded. The system architecture was fine, but the data volume was keeping increased and revealed the painful issues and errors that nobody had expected. We faced very strange queries seemed to be unbelievable. In my short talk I would like to share sad experience of arised-from-nothing high loads in DBMS and solving the challenge.

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How can we ensure that this – pretty much outdated – recommendation suit well our needs?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

In this session we will deep dive into the exciting features of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, including new versions of PostgreSQL releases, new extensions, larger instances. We will also show benchmarks of new RDS instance types, and their value proposition. We will also look at how high availability and read scaling works on RDS PostgreSQL. We will also explore lessons we have learned managing a large fleet of PostgreSQL instances, including important tunables and possible gotchas around pg_upgrade.