PgConf.Russia 2020

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.

If you care about Postgres performance, there are a number of hardware acceleration options to help with different use cases. Intel Optane DC persistent memory creates new tier in data hierarchy allowing developers to utilize performance of traditional memory combining with volume and persistency of block storage devices. Unlike traditional DRAM-only in-memory systems, where memory is small, expensive, and volatile, Intel Optane DC persistent memory makes it possible to run larger Postgres databases (terabytes) in memory for higher performance. FPGAs are integrated circuits that can be reprogrammed dynamically to accelerate a specific workload such as SQL execution and data compression. FPGA accelerators extend Postgres with hundreds of SQL reader and writer processes that work in parallel on the FPGA. It’s similar to adding hundreds new cores to boost parallel processing on your server.

MobilityDB is an open source moving object database system (https://github.com/ULB-CoDE-WIT/MobilityDB). Its core function is to efficiently store and query mobility tracks, such as vehicle GPS trajectories. It implements the Moving Features specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). MobiltyDB is engineered up from PostgreSQL and PostGIS, providing spatiotemporal data management via SQL. It thus integrates with the postgreSQL eco-system allowing for complex architectures such as mobility stream processing and cloud deployments.

The presentation will explain the architecture of MobilityDB, its database types, indexes, and operations. We will highlight the PostgreSQL features that enable this extension, and the would like to have features. This presentation will be of special interest to the PostgreSQL community, and to professionals in the transportation domain.

I'll show an example of solving the problem of searching "similar" texts for one given text in big array using GiST index. The problem itself is not much important, but it is easy to understand. Using this problem as example, I'll show one of many methods of adapting GiST index for custom search problems. Maybe this talk will help you to solve other search problems.