PGConf.Russia 2022

Our talk reviews the modern tools for administering PostgreSQL. It also covers the DBMS's performance bottlenecks and provides approaches to resolving the related issues. The presentation tackles the problems that occur while Oracle to Postgres migrations including the following: performance tuning tools (the analogues of AWR and ASH); monitoring tools (the analogues of Cloud Control); ensuring high availability and reliability of the database (grid infrastructure analogues); known "database performance bottlenecks"; an overview of options for technical support options SLAs.

PostgreSQL has a number of peculiarities that you need to take into account not only while maintaining your database but also when designing your database schema. Experienced PostgreSQL are well aware of vacuuming process. On the web one can find tons of materials covering its internals, configurations and monitoring. Many valuable talks about vacuum were given at numerous conferences. However, we still face the common wraparound problem when the maximum possible number of transactions (xid) is reached. It happens even on databases that are relatively small in size. In my presentation, I will share a customer case that looks interesting to me. A chain of mistakes made at different stages of the database's life cycle once caused a disaster. The database fully stopped for one week, we detected a wraparound and spotted corrupted blocks. Maintenance was problematical, and we spent sleepless nights in search of a solution. We managed to achieve a local win as we finally restored the database, but it's not the end of this story, which makes it even more interesting.

About 7 years ago, I moved from Windows-only development lead by an irresistible desire to add some parts to PostgreSQL. In this talk, I would like to cover things that were not obvious to me when I started working with the source code, the PG build and testing system. I'm going to talk about the simplest issues - routine IDE tasks, navigation, build and release process, and similar stuff. What I will share isn't the one and only truth. Some topics might relate to dummy-level problems :) I would be glad if other developers also shared the secrets of their development life. We can arrange a discussion of grep vs IDE :)

This talk is about our work on detailed vacuum workload statistics collection by the statistics collector and about problem solutions and benefits it can provide.