PGConf.Online 2021

Recently landed in PostgreSQL, jsonb subscripting support doesn't look as exciting as some other improvements around jsonb. But it's user visible changes are only tip of the iceberg. How many people were involved to make it, and what decisions choices were made? How long did it take, and what are the good/bad ideas to promote a patch? These and few other questions will be our targets in this talk.

JSONB is a popular data type in Postgres, and there is demand from users to improve its performance. In particular, we want to optimize a typical pattern of using jsonb as a storage for relatively short metadata and big blobs, which is currently highly inefficient. We will discuss several approaches to jsonb improvement and present the results of our experiments.

When using PostgreSQL in production it is important to implement a strategy for High Availability. With a database service, the HA properties apply to both the service itself and of course to the data set.

In this talk we learn how to think about specific HA needs of your production environment and how to achieve your requirements with Open Source tooling when it comes to your database of choice, PostgreSQL. In particular, we dive in many options that could be implemented for Postgres to evolve its offering from being a toolset to being “batteries included”. What does it mean in the context of HA? How to achieve it?

Once at Adjust we faced a problem of impending xid wraparound in a very central database due to a long-stalled autovacuum run. Because we spotted warnings 5 hours before impending disaster we were able to minimize the customer impact. Come learn how we used the time to prepare, and what lessons this has for others facing unusual problems in large databases.