PgConf.Russia 2019

PostgreSQL provides possibility to create temporary tables. Though a temporary table is accessible only to a single session and is removed at the end of the session, all information about it is stored in the system catalogs of PostgreSQL. This is related to several issues, which make it difficult or impossible to use temporary tables in some cases. There are attempts to solve this feature, including in our company. But they have not yet succeeded, mainly because of the PostgreSQL engine. In the talk I want to tell about simple and small pg_variables extension. It allows you to create table variables along with scalar ones. I will tell how it can replace temporary tables, what advantages and disadvantages it has.

To migrate to a PostgreSQL/Postgres Pro we need multi-core servers to be carefully tuned for correct parallelism. What settings make multi-terabyte installations work fast and correctly?

We will share our PostgreSQL/Postgres Pro on BullSequana S and Bullion S servers testing experience.

The features of this hardware platform which are crucial for high-loaded configurations
• Multi-core Scale-up servers and PostgreSQL/Postgres Pro
• Results of stress testing of PostgreSQL/Postgres Pro running on the equipment.

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.

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.