PgConf.Russia 2019

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.

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.

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.

Postgres is known for it extensibility, which made it the universal database, that means it can meet the requirements of practically any project. Many extensions are well-known and widely used, for example, PostGIS extension - de-facto standard of open source GIS, hstore - an extension for storing and manipulation of arbitrary key/value pairs. I will talk about less known but useful PostgreSQL extensions, which provides a new functionaliy and/or improve the performance of PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL was designed to be extensible, it provides an API to application developers to extend PostgreSQL functionality and/or improve the performance for specific data and workloads. It is important that there is no need of having expertise of core developers, and these new functionality could be added online without restarting of database server. Application developer can create various database objects, such as functions, data types, operators, indexes, and even new access methods.

I will present my choice of two extensions out of hundreds:

vops - greatly improves the performance of Postgres for OLAP queries using vector operations, pg_variables - provides session variables for storing scalars and relations, useful for generating reports on read-only replicas.