PGConf.Russia 2021

Postgres has been a vibrant project for decades, and probably will be popular for decades to come. However, as with any complex endeavor, challenges are always lurking. This talk explores the many project, competitive, and technical challenges in the future that could derail its success. By exploring these challenges, we will be better able to avoid them.

The development of secure system software (like an operating system or a DBMS) and ensuring trust in it are complicated scientific and technical tasks. In our presentation, we will demonstrate how we resolved these tasks for the Astra Linux OS certified to comply with the highest security classes. We will discuss the key directions of our activities, from the formation of national standards to the development and verification of the formal access model, which is the basis for the attack surface protection mechanism on the OS's level. We will also share how we apply the methods and technologies of dynamic and static analysis of the program code and, finally, we will explain how we collect and analyze the data we get from analyzing the OS code. We will also discuss how to fix the code errors in the project with continuous integration.

We maintain large PostgreSQL databases with the total data volume exceeding 180 TB. Every instance in the cluster gets a workload of 15 thousand requests per second. These circumstances certainly impose limitations on the classical approach to updating database structures. The cost of a DBA error gets higher, as even a small error can lead to a sleepless night) In my talk, I will cover our existing limitations for changes in the production environment, non-classical DBMS behavior under heavy workloads, and will discuss PostgreSQL in general.