PgConf.Russia 2020

Locking is critical for providing high concurrency for any database — you cannot fully utilize your hardware if locking is throttling its use. This talk explores all aspects of locking in Postgres by showing queries and their locks; covered lock types include row, table, shared, exclusive, and advisory lock types. The high concurrency provided by Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) is also covered.

Slides are at https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/locking.pdf

pg_repack is one of the most popular instruments for removing bloat of tables and indexes in Postgres. In most cases, it works perfectly. But if you use such a feature of Postgres as deferred constraints, using pg_repack becomes more difficult or even impossible. I will talk about how we encountered the problem and will describe some workarounds - from internal instruments of Postgres to a small patch for pg_repack.

The story about powering a 1.5 petabyte analytics application with 2816 cores and 18.7 TB of memory in the Citus cluster at the Microsoft. The Windows team measures the quality of new software builds by scrutinizing 20,000 diagnostic metrics based on data flowing in from 800 million Windows devices. At the same time, the team evaluates feedback from Microsoft engineers who are using pre-release versions of Windows updates. At Microsoft, the Windows diagnostic metrics are displayed on a real-time analytics dashboard called “Release Quality View” (RQV), which helps the internal “ship-room” team assess the quality of the customer experience before each new Windows update is released. Given the importance of Windows for Microsoft’s customers, the RQV analytics dashboard is a critical tool for Windows engineers, program managers, and execs.

Open-source maintainers face many challenges as projects grow. How to write more required features, fix more issues and have time to watch more pull requests? On the example of WAL-G(backup tool for PostgreSQL) I will tell you about how we solved these problems by launching a course of Open-source development at Ural Federal University, what we achieved and what will we do next.