PgConf.Russia 2020

A short overview of the main trends in Postgres development - both for the product itself and the community. What has changed in community goals?

An enterprise-grade PostgreSQL requires many complementary technologies to the database core: high availability and automated failover, monitoring and alerting, centralized logging, connection pooling, etc. That is, a stack of components around PostgreSQL. Kubernetes has enabled a new model to deploy software abstracting away the infrastructure. However, containers are not lightweight VMs, and the packing of software paradigms that work on VMs are not valid on containers/Kubernetes. How should be PostgreSQL and its stack be deployed on Kubernetes? Enter StackGres. An open source software that is the result of re-engineering PostgreSQL to become cloud native. Join this talk to learn and see demos of how to generate PostgreSQL minimal containers; how the sidecar pattern is used (abused) to integrate PostgreSQL’s stack components, and how the networking and storage are handled. More info: stackgres.io.

If you care about Postgres performance, there are a number of hardware acceleration options to help with different use cases. Intel Optane DC persistent memory creates new tier in data hierarchy allowing developers to utilize performance of traditional memory combining with volume and persistency of block storage devices. Unlike traditional DRAM-only in-memory systems, where memory is small, expensive, and volatile, Intel Optane DC persistent memory makes it possible to run larger Postgres databases (terabytes) in memory for higher performance. FPGAs are integrated circuits that can be reprogrammed dynamically to accelerate a specific workload such as SQL execution and data compression. FPGA accelerators extend Postgres with hundreds of SQL reader and writer processes that work in parallel on the FPGA. It’s similar to adding hundreds new cores to boost parallel processing on your server.

In the report I will talk about how Zabbix appeared in our company, how we lived with Oracle, why we decided to switch to PostgreSQL, what problems we had during the transition, and what software seemed like a good choice for working with PostgreSQL.