PgConf.Russia 2019

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.

As any ordinary software developers, we just pursued a goal to develop a system robust for high loads, and even succeeded. The system architecture was fine, but the data volume was keeping increased and revealed the painful issues and errors that nobody had expected. We faced very strange queries seemed to be unbelievable. In my short talk I would like to share sad experience of arised-from-nothing high loads in DBMS and solving the challenge.

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.

This talk will contain 3 parts: 1. Express PITR setup to the Cloud 2. Latest advancements in WAL-G for backups 3. Why you may need or should avoid this new features, depending on your specifications and workload.