PGConf.Russia 2021

Crew Resource Management is a field which has become critical in many fields including aviation and nuclear power. However in IT, this field has not been well implemented. In this talk we will discuss what crew resource management is, what kinds of problems it solves, and why all database teams should implement it.

Several PostgreSQL-related case studies will be discussed and both technical and human factors will be part of the case studies.

From the very beginning of 2021, I'm fixing a bug in CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY. This bug manifests extremely seldom. I could not find any traces of it in mailing lists ever since the introduction of the feature in 8.2. Yet the bug affected our systems, so I decided to fix it. This is how the9i detective bug-hunting story started. In this story, I'll share details of the implementation of transactions and lock mechanics.

The built-in partitioning mechanism in PostgreSQL has been developing for several years. However, there is no magic button that would transform an ordinary table into a partitioned one. I will explain how to implement partitioning in a production system, how to prepare your table and apps for partitioning, and what pitfalls can make a DBA's life harder. We will also take a deep dive into various techniques of transferring data between partitions, also considering their pros, cons and limitation.

I will not teach you database design or query optimization. This talk will cover Python drivers, PostgreSQL usage in Python, and various tools from sync and async world enabling such usage, and how this ecosystem evolved. We'll discuss Python libraries including aiopg, psycopg2, asyncpg, pgbouncer and how they interact with Postgres.