PgConf.Russia 2020

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.

It is our experience of the medical information system "RT MIS" transfer from MSSQL to PostgreSQL . When the necessity of transfer to PostgreSQL in our "RT MIS", one of the largest medical information systems, became imminent, we felt really terrified having assessed its amount: there was a huge number of stored procedures, functions, SQL-queries in its application code and services. It all requested transcribing, was exacerbated by demands on the system accessibility. So the variant "we awoke in the morning and PostgreSQL was working everywhere" was definitely impossible. That is why we chose another way: began eating "the elephant (PostgreSQL)" in chunks.

In my report, I am going to share our practical experience of the transfer, the instruments we used, the reason for another replication, the problems we met and their solutions. And finally, what turned out to be better: PostgreSQL or MSSQL.

An enterprise-grade PostgreSQL requires many complementary technologies to the database core: high availability and automated failover, monitoring and alerting, centralized logging, connection pooling, etc. That is, a stack of components around PostgreSQL. Kubernetes has enabled a new model to deploy software abstracting away the infrastructure. However, containers are not lightweight VMs, and the packing of software paradigms that work on VMs are not valid on containers/Kubernetes. How should be PostgreSQL and its stack be deployed on Kubernetes? Enter StackGres. An open source software that is the result of re-engineering PostgreSQL to become cloud native. Join this talk to learn and see demos of how to generate PostgreSQL minimal containers; how the sidecar pattern is used (abused) to integrate PostgreSQL’s stack components, and how the networking and storage are handled. More info: stackgres.io.

Walk-through of extending PostgreSQL with a user-defined type. The journey begins from the basics, from creating simple domain types over existing types, and continues to implementing a full-blown datatype from scratch in C.

PostgreSQL's advanced index types, GiST, GIN, and SP-GiST, are covered in enough detail to give an understanding of what each of them is good for. Support functions for each of them are shown for the example 'color' datatype.