PgConf.Russia 2020

Many businesses which use Database management systems like Oracle, DB2 & MS SQL are unreliable these days. Moreover, the costs incurred in maintaining these systems and its product licenses keeps on increasing. As the competitors are migrating over to the new technologies and tools available in the market, it is necessary for these businesses to migrate to new environment which is efficient, consistent and reliable to stay in the market and the technologies used in the current environment have become obsolete or no longer serve the business purpose. PostgreSQL has emerged as a top open-source RDBMS software. Since there is no licensing cost associated with it most of the companies are planning to migrate the databases which are currently running on other RDBMS like Oracle, DB2, MS SQL server to PostgreSQL. This report summarizes the various methodologies, procedures and techniques involved in successfully migrating the data from Oracle to PostgreSQL & DB2 to PostgreSQL. Migration is not a simple effort there should be proper planning and testing involved in this right from database connectivity to performance analysis. In this paper we are going to cover most of the steps which we need to consider before the migration and after the migration like choosing the correct tools for implementing the migration, time taken to migrate ,data compatibility, code conversion, application connectivity to database, database configuration parameters, performance analysis, replication setups, database monitoring, patching and backup strategies.

It is our experience of the medical information system "RT MIS" transfer from MSSQL to PostgreSQL . When the necessity of transfer to PostgreSQL in our "RT MIS", one of the largest medical information systems, became imminent, we felt really terrified having assessed its amount: there was a huge number of stored procedures, functions, SQL-queries in its application code and services. It all requested transcribing, was exacerbated by demands on the system accessibility. So the variant "we awoke in the morning and PostgreSQL was working everywhere" was definitely impossible. That is why we chose another way: began eating "the elephant (PostgreSQL)" in chunks.

In my report, I am going to share our practical experience of the transfer, the instruments we used, the reason for another replication, the problems we met and their solutions. And finally, what turned out to be better: PostgreSQL or MSSQL.

I'll show an example of solving the problem of searching "similar" texts for one given text in big array using GiST index. The problem itself is not much important, but it is easy to understand. Using this problem as example, I'll show one of many methods of adapting GiST index for custom search problems. Maybe this talk will help you to solve other search problems.

pg_probackup is a flexible tool that allows choosing the backup strategy depending on the write load of the PostgreSQL cluster, as well as offers a number of other features that can facilitate this vital aspect of database maintenance. In this tutorial, we will see how to apply this tool in practice.