PgConf.Russia 2019

When you are optimizing Postgres it is usually maintenance that goes by the wayside. How do we fix autovacuum? Where did all of this bloat come from? Why am I getting IO spikes? How do I get RDS to behave?! Why are commits so slow on replication? The answer to all of these questions is understanding the relationship between proper Postgres maintenance and performance. Join us for a 3 hour jaunt through the wily world of making Postgres Go!

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.

In this talk we will have a look at the details of autovacuum's implementation and see what kind of practical implications they have. The talk will also provide a short overview of patches for autovacuum that are currently being considered by the developer community and that may be included in newer versions of PostgreSQL.

DBMS inside container is a nightmare for DBA. I will describe how we use containerized Postgres in Juno. What problems we faced with and how did we solve them.