PgConf.Russia 2020

In Zabbix-server 4.4, a new Zabbix-agent has become available. It is written in Golang, has a plug-in structure, keeps a permanent connection and makes it possible to control metrics in runtime. We will make an overview of the Zabbix-agent 2 and talk about how to develop plugins for it, in particular, the PostgreSQL monitoring plugin developed by Postgres Professional in collaboration with Zabbix.

At the master class, we will learn how to execute fast load tests of Postgres databases: optimizing database configurations, data structure, indexes, OS settings, etc. To do this, we will create a code, build the infrastructure for the test from it and will do the test. As a result, we get a flexible tool in the code to which you can attach any monitoring, and for which you don't have to pay a lot of money, because the environment is created in 7 minutes in an empty AWS account and destroyed after test

Any DBA needs some kind of tool for historical workload analyse. Assume once at morning your monitoring team will report of sudden performance degradation at 2-3 a.m., and now you need to investigate this issue. What activities was most resource consuming within that hour? There are several tools for solving this problem, and I'll talk about one very easy and convenient tool - pg_profile. It need only a postgres database and a cron-like tool to run, and it will generate a workload profile report for your database as you need it. Ths report will be a good start point for further investigation.

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.