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.

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.

Optimisation of queries can have a significant impact on database performance. In my talk, I will review the tools that we use in our practice and discuss some use-cases. This talk is of interest to database administrators or developers who would like to optimise their database performance and learn new query optimisation techniques.