PgConf.Russia 2019

IIn the world of programming, the creation of source code for databases "procedural extensions" is something solitary. Most DBMS offers procedural languages and "stored procedures" to create procedural extensions. In Postgres the number of supported procedural languages has already exceeded a dozen.

Traditionally, stored procedures have many applications: it is difficult to resist the attraction to perform a data operation directly in the storage, especially in the Enterprise development. This approach quickly leads to the spreading of the business logic and dramatically increases the cost of support and development of the system as a whole.

The life cycle of stored procedures makes it difficult to use standard Change Management tools and practices. It is necessary to adapt the operations upon the stored procedures to the standards of Change Management, yet staying within the comfortable development practices.

We'll look at the typical tasks of the procedural extensions development and discuss the solutions we are implementing in the Xobot IDE.

Magic tricks followed by exposure (1C+PG):

• Focus number one. How to convince the accounting department to buy a new server.
• Focus number two. How to show that MS SQL is faster than PostgreSQL.
• Focus number three. How to show that PostgreSQL is faster than MS SQL Server.

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How can we ensure that this – pretty much outdated – recommendation suit well our needs?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 tutorial we will discuss Binary and Logical replication in a practitioner format. The topics that will be included are native Postgres replication technologies, configuring and managing them. We will also discuss performance and draw backs of various architectures (sync vs async etc...). At the end of this presentation the attendees will be able to configure a basic replication deployment with HOT Standby and well as have an understanding of other technologies such as Point in Time Recovery and cascading replication.