PgConf.Russia 2020

Kubernetes is the new way of deploying software, programmatically, on almost any infrastructure (be it cloud or on-prem). But is a complex beast. How to get started? How to dive deeper? What are the specific best-practices and special hints for Postgres DBAs dealing with Kubernetes? Join this half-day tutorial to learn, practically, among other topics:

• How to quickly get started with Kubernetes
• Manage storage
• Manage services, networking and ingress/egress
• How to make Postgres cloud-native in Kubernetes
• Do a show-run of existing Postgres operators, including Zalando, CrunchyData and StackGres.

This tutorial is very practical. BYOL! (Bring Your Own Laptop). With Kubernetes installed! (check microk8s, minikube or k3s if you don’t have any installed.

To build a decent query plan, the optimizer has to understand statistical characteristics of underlying data. It is interesting to observe how the structure of the collected information became more complicated over time: what the optimizer relied on back in its early days and what is at his disposal now with the release of the 12th version. We will also talk about how and when statistics are collected, how to manage this process and whether it is necessary to think about it at all.

Everyone has heard something about transaction isolation levels, but oddly enough, almost no one can clearly explain what it is any why it is important. At the same time, for many operations, it is critical to have a clear understanding of isolation levels and how they can affect the result. Indeed, if a customer has been paid twice and the developer has to pay back the losses, it won't seem unimportant. We'll discuss how to avoid such unpleasant situations.

I will share our experience of migrating a server application for Russian railways from Oracle 11g Standard Edition to vanilla PostgreSQL 11.5.
At the time of migration, the database contained about 200 stored procedures of over 60000 lines of Oracle PL/SQL code (which has been developed since 2006, that is, for more than 12 years), about 250 tables, and 50GB of data.
Starting with a prologue, we'll describe our adventures along the migration process, as well as pleasant and unpleasant surprises we encountered, and finally get to an epilogue and a happy end. The story is told on behalf of an Oracle user exploring Postgres.