PgConf.Russia 2020

Migrating engineering software from Oracle to PostgreSQL
Dmitry will talk about using an automated migrator developed by "Diasoft" company for migrating Russian systems to PostgreSQL.
Taking the LOOTSMAN engineering software (developed by the ASKON company), we will speak about the key aspects of migration, review possible issues and ways to resolve them, as well as discuss performance optimization methods for migrated stored procedures.

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.

Role-based access control (RBAC) is one of the main mechanisms used for access control in many DBMS, including PostgreSQL. This model is a sub-type of traditional discretionary access control with its restrictions. In addition to DAC, many operating systems also use mandatory access control (MAC) based on security labels. This additional security mechanism is obligatory for protecting information that demands higher levels of security. Naturally, we would like to use MAC within DBMS when working in OS with mandatory access control switched on.
In this talk, we'll give an overview of existing MAC implementations in DBMS, as well as share our approach to using security mechanisms provided by SELinux, the sepgsql extension for PostgreSQL, and the standard mechanism of row-level security (RLS), which has been available in PostgreSQL starting from version 9.5.
In our presentation, we will use the "Airlines" demo database provided by the Postgres Professional company to show how to protect sensitive information and personal data, compare different ways of storing security labels, and assess performance of our solution.

When migrating data from one DBMS to another, the question arises: choose a third-party tool or to program the migration yourself? Companies, trying to grow competencies within themselves, choose the second option. And they come across the "invention of their own bicycles". However, the market has powerful free data migration tools. One such tool is Pentaho Data Integration, part of the Pentaho Community Edition. The report will discuss the use of this package for data migration between Oracle and PostgreSQL. Particular attention will be paid to the problems with using this tool, and to the tasks of testing for the completeness and integrity of migrated data.

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