Using JSONB

JSONB in PostgreSQL has interesting properties for design and development of business systems with heavy domain, helping to fight against complexity and variability. We will discuss the trade-offs of the JSONB approach. Using an open source project for Health IT - fhirbase we will:

• load synthetic medical data into PostgreSQL
• learn how to search and index this data (gin, jsquery, json-knife)
• use JSON aggregation to build complex queries (GraphQL)
• see how this data can be modified and validated
• discuss architecture consequences of JSONB usage

Technical requirements:

• docker
• docker-compose

Detailed prerequisites

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.

What should we expect from PostgreSQL 12?

PostgreSQL 12 Feature Freeze is scheduled for April 2019, which didn't come yet. But general shapes of upcoming release are already visible. In this talk I'll consider patches already committed to PostgreSQL 12 as well as patches, which would be committed very likely. I'll talk with special passion about SQL/JSON, Merge, pluggable table access methods and zheap.

Python and PostgreSQL Using psycopg2

Python may not be the fastest programming language on the CPU, but its fast and easy development saves a lot of costs between the keyboard and the chair. In this workshop we'll explore the most popular library for the access to the PostgreSQL server named "psycopg2" and write a short application using some of its useful features.