PgConf.Russia 2019

Brendan Gregg’s USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) method for monitoring is quite known. There’s also Tom Wilkie’s RED (Rate, Errors, Durations) method, which is suggested to be better suited to monitor services than USE. I want to talk about how we employ these methodologies when we develop our Postgres monitoring in okmeter.io.

In this master class, I will take you step-by step through a major upgrade of PostgreSQL. Through our practice we see a lot of different PostgreSQL servers in production environment and often, almost too often teams who once made PostgreSQL their database of choice never update it following the initial installation. The are many different reasons for it, the result, however, is the same - they all miss out on the new useful features of the newer releases and reduced database performance.
The goal of my masterclass is to equip attendees with necessary tools for performing PostgreSQL upgrade. I will take you through each step of the major upgrade and will dive into each executed command. I will also explain the particular order in which I perform an upgrade and explain the consequences of not following this order or missing a particular step. We will perform an upgrade of PostgreSQL 9.0 to 11. My hope is that following this masterclass number of outdated PostgreSQL database will reduce since participants will then go back to their databases and make sure that they are running the most recent version.

In my talk I'll tell you about practices of working with Postgres in the Go-services. I’ll describe general advantages and disadvantages of the basic tools that are commonly used when working with Postgres using Go. Of course, we will touch on the nuances that need to be taken into account when your services are running inside the Kubernetes. I will also talk about Avito’s experience in providing a database of product’s developers. This presentation will be of interest to developers who want to avoid problems when working with Postgres, and will be useful to DBA who want to know what difficulties customers face in their database.

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.