PgConf.Russia 2019

Stop paying for Larry’s boat!

PostgreSQL is a fully-featured, enterprise-grade and open source database, named two years in a row database of the year! And it’s also the best candidate to migrate off of Oracle, supporting very advanced SQL, easy administration and pl/pgsql, a replacement for Oracle’s PL/SQL. Stop spending hundreds of thousands or millions of $ on database licenses and reinvest them in your team, infrastructure and software.

Join this half-day tutorial to learn the best practices, tricks and tools to perform a successful Oracle to PostgreSQL migration. Learn from the team that performed 150M users Blackberry migration to PostgreSQL on GCP with near-zero downtime, and the key author behind orafce, a set of Oracle compatible functions on top of PostgreSQL.

JSONB in PostgreSQL has interesting properties for design and development of business systems with heavy domain, helping to fight against complexity and variability. We will discuss the trade-offs of the JSONB approach. Using an open source project for Health IT - fhirbase we will:

• load synthetic medical data into PostgreSQL
• learn how to search and index this data (gin, jsquery, json-knife)
• use JSON aggregation to build complex queries (GraphQL)
• see how this data can be modified and validated
• discuss architecture consequences of JSONB usage

Technical requirements:

• docker
• docker-compose

Detailed prerequisites

A major responsibility of a database engine is to convert a declarative SQL query to an efficient execution plan, employing various methods to scan and join the relations. There is always a development effort to improve this area. What clever execution plans can PostgreSQL generate, what's new in version 11 and what is in development? To name a few things, the joins are optimized by removing unneeded outer and inner joins, and reducing joins from outer and semi to inner. There is work to enable merge joins on inequality and range overlap, and to improve join selectivity estimates with multi-column statistics. When it comes to scanning a single relation, covering indexes allow to use index-only scans more often. Incremental sort and more precise estimation of sorting costs help generate better paths when sorted output is required, e.g. when using GROUP BY and ORDER BY or performing merge joins. This talk aims to give an overview of such optimizations that already exist and that are being developed now.

The first training course "DBA1. PostgreSQL Administration. Basic Course" was introduced by Postgres Professional in September 2015. The course was based on the then up-to-date version of PostgreSQL 9.4. A set of new courses has been introduced since then. In turn, the PostgreSQL database didn't stand still either.

The report will present the current line of courses for administrators and application developers. We will also show the roadmap for the near future, which includes specialist certification.