PgConf.Russia 2019

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.

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.

The dark age for PostgreSQL started at 2GIS after transitioning to the microservice architecture. Every team tried to cook database on their own — by installing instances, juggling versions, trying to code deployments with numerous tools or using manual operations. It was the right time to develop a “silver bullet” — a common set of tools to solve all the problems at once. We created our own cluster solution based on well-known PostgreSQL, repmgr, pgbouncer and Barman. Despite of the complexity of our final solution, we developed a repeatable flexible deployment to accelerate postgresql cluster deployment and management. Also we deployed the our own cluster to consolidate all databases. It helped to eliminate team efforts for database management and focus on their main goals. Failover works, we tried it :-)

At pgconf’17 I talked about our analytics systems based on PostgreSQL. Afterwards we looked at hadoop, s3, presto, vertica, and other frights. Finally we stopped to suffer nonsense and just completed PostgreSQL with ready Greenplum and Clickhouse. As a result, we achieved amazing performance, fast migration, easy maintenance, reliability and horizontal scalability. We enabled to recover the system after fault in two commands, decreased infrastructure costs and expanded functionality due to ANSI SQL, MPP and In-memory. All within the open-source and full SQL paradigm. We called the product GreenHouseSQL, which is our inner whole cycle data platform. In the talk we will show the beauty of solution internals, explain the advantages and flaws, tips and tricks of starting with Greenplum, as well as why do we need Clickhouse, what is left to PostgreSQL, and eventually how does it all work.