PgConf.Russia 2019

I would like to share my experience in optimization queries in PostgreSQL of RMIS (Regional Medical Information System).

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.

One of the most soft after features of Postgres v10 is logical replication. In this presentation we will cover what Logical Replication is, how it compares to Binary (Streaming Replication), how Logical Replication works, configuring Logical Replication, Logical Replication limitations, gotchas, security and management. We will also discuss potential deployed architectures with Logical and Binary Replication and some neat features of the underlying technology.

At the end of this presentation an attendee with a reasonable understanding of how to manage Postgres will be able to configure Logical replication for use.

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 :-)