PgConf.Russia 2020

Sometimes it maybe a very tricky just to establish a connection with your remote database. Especially if your working place is in highly secured corporate environment and your database server is in highly secured remote cloud.

We will talk about bypassing SSH, SSL, jump servers, proxy servers, VPNs and various SSO (Kerberos/SSPI/LDAP/Active Directory) authentication systems in order to access your PostgreSQL database using console or rich UI interface and JDBC. We will describe different use cases - from trivial and typical to insane and over-secured.

In the report, we want to talk about the experience of migrating one large system from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The system itself was built on the PHP + Oracle stack; its distinguishing feature was that all business logic was implemented in PL / SQL code. In a DBMS, there are more than 3000 packages with 4-10 functions (procedures) in each. In PHP - more than 10,000 forms with inserts of anonymous blocks used to receive data, process and save results in Oracle.

To solve this extremely voluminous work, we took ANTLR4 (a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text), PL/SQL grammar, and created an automatic converter that allows you to convert all objects in the schema and our system from Oracle to working code for PostgreSQL.

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.

We will discuss stored procedures and functions, as well as the code within the database in general. We'll take a look at stored procedures from different angles: as a DBA, a database developer, and a backend developer. We will try to understand the specifics of stored procedures that often go against the common coding guidelines, and discuss best practices for working with stored procedures.
This is mainly a motivational talk for database and backend developers, not an advanced tech talk.