PgConf.Russia 2019

Managed database services are gaining in popularity. In this session we look at how best to configure Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and also look at common user operations of using RDS for PostgreSQL. We will also look beyond common user operations and into some specific optimizations related to upgrade, logical replication, performance, and reducing downtime.

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 :-)

Sometimes problems arise during Postgres operation, and the faster they are identified and resolved, the happier users eventually will be. pgCenter is a set of CLI powerful utilities for troubleshooting in the "here and now" mode. In the talk I will show how to use pgCenter for efficient troubleshooting, the directions in which to search, and how to respond to certain problems, in particular how to:

• check if Postgres is in the normal state;
• identify promptly the faulty clients and stop them;
• reveal too heavy queries;
• and other tips and tricks of pgCenter.

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.