PGConf.Russia 2021

When PostgreSQL was at its formation stage, its transaction ID was chosen to be 32-bit. Back then, no one could imagine that someday we may need more than 4 billion transactions. However, ongoing technical progress and digitization pushed some Postgres instances towards their transaction ID limit. The Postgres community reacted to this with a wraparound of the transaction ID counter. However, constantly growing data volumes exposed PostgreSQL to new challenges. In my presentation, I will cover these challenges and explain how they can be solved with a 64-bit transaction ID, what the consequences will be like, why now it is a good time to implement 64x IDs, and why this hasn't been done previously.

Everyone knows very well what a failover cluster PostgreSQL is and how such a cluster protects against failures within the same data center. However, recently, more and more enterprises have placed increased demands on their services, these requirements include disaster tolerance. We call such clusters a GEO-Cluster (KUK). In the report, I will talk about the varieties, principles and approaches to building GEO-Clusters PostgreSQL based on the Corosync/Pacemaker cluster software.

PostgreSQL protocol compression has been discussed in the community for a long time. Many different hypotheses have been expressed and tested, and the compression patch has received a large number of changes and improvements. I will review the various approaches tested during the implementation of protocol compression, and will highlight the current status.

PostgreSQL could easily be named the master of indexes - there is no other database that could compete with Postgres for the variety of indexes. How developers can use this advantage effectively in their day to day work? How do you know which index to create? When the created index might slow our application’s performance? We will try to get our head around this topic with some use cases and live examples. This talk would be of interest for any developer who wants to expand their knowledge of indexes in Postgres and secure the best performance for their application.