Less known but worthwile PostgreSQL extensions

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.

Postgres + patroni + consul + s3 + walg + ansible = Simple HA cluster

Patroni is getting art of state standard framework for building HA clusters with postgres now.

During session we will build simple 3 node cluster using mentioned stack.

We will discuss patroni's architecture, and most interesting parameters from it's configuration. We will check how actually failover works and how could you initialise cluster.

After session you will be able to built such cluster from scratch in minutes using given ansible playbooks.

DIY database index

I'm going to talk about emerging technologies in the area of general purpose RDBMS indexing. I will describe different approaches suitable for different workloads. We will discuss ideas from academic researches and corresponding industrial response from developers, communities, and companies. There will be the short live-coding session on creating DIY index in PostgreSQL.

Greenplum: Internal Structure of MPP PostgreSQL for Analytics

As we all know, PostgreSQL is a classic vertically scalable database for OLTP loads. In parallel with PostgreSQL for many years there is its alternative horizontal-scalable MPP version of PostgreSQL, that is called Greenplum, sharpened for big data and OLAP workload. In my pitch I will show the internal architecture of Greenplum (distributed transactions, data sharding, partitioning with hybrid storage in external systems, column storage engines with compression, and much more), a comparison with the internal structure of PostgreSQL and the application areas of each solution are shown.