PgConf.Russia 2019

My presentation is about writing extensions in Postgres. I have written pg_threads that implements simplified POSIX thread API inside Postgres database. It adds a new powerful abstraction giving database developers new opportunities for writing parallel code thus taking advantage of multicore CPUs. There is an extra API for transactional and non-transactional IPC between threads. I also have an example application that takes advantage of this new API that scales linearly even across 2 nodes. The presentation is with live working demo using vagrant project with 2 VMs running Ubuntu and 2 Postgres 11 databases.

This report focuses on the continuation of transferring our ECM “Priority” from MS SQL to Postgres. Technical solutions, issues of rewriting from T-SQL to plpgsql, optimization of the effective code and moving data will be covered. Additionally, there will be considered aspects of pgplsql performance testing to find the “bad code” of pgplsql as a candidate for optimization. The main objective of the presentation is to answer the question: "We have it in T-SQL - how to transfer it in PG?". The report is intended for junior Postgres developers and is a continuation of the previous report made at the conference in 2017(https://youtu.be/v6_4Szr8t14).

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.

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.