PgConf.Russia 2020

A brief story how MySQL → PG migration could increase company efficiency tenfold times:

1. Program code has been reduced 50 times, with optimization of backend team (from 15 to 3 engineers)
2. Software development of new features has become measuring in days, not in months
3. Infrastructure costs per 1M users have been reduced 20 times
4. Database structure and technical documentation were simplified significantly, from 100K high-dependent tables to just 20 simple tables
5. New security level because of total forbidden on external SQL commands to the database
6. Quick analytics aggregation on multiple parameters, without external analytics systems
7. The last, but not the least: the main business was keeping alive during migration

PostgreSQL is one of the most readily extensible databases in the world. Custom data types, aggregations, functions, and more can be easily and safely written in C.

This hands-on tutorial covers the basics of writing functions, data types, and aggregates in C. It is recommended (though not strictly required) that bring their own laptops and be prepared to actually try the exercises.

Topics covered include: 1. The PostgreSQL type system 2. Creating a simple custom type in C 3. Common errors for non-C programmers 4. Creating a simple aggregate in C

There will be many opportunities for questions and discussion through the tutorial.

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.

Recently, I was working on a project where graphQL was used for sending requests to its .NET Core backend, but this was not a good idea. The point is, a graphQL query is a hierarchical structure with a dynamic set of fields. It’s difficult to perform such requests via a statically-typed programming language and a relational database as suggested by the tools available. So, I came up with the idea of using the plv8 extension and perform graphQL queries right on the database side. It took me about two hours to develop a working prototype that could perform the same queries as the software under development for more than one month! Then various improvements have been made and I want to introduce them all. If you are thinking of using graphQL instead of REST, my speech could be most useful and could help you to save a lot of time.