PGConf.Russia 2022

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.

Tasks for migrations from the classic commercial DBMSs to open-source solutions are still relevant nowadays. Tools used to migrate Oracle applications to PostgreSQL has already proved to be efficient. But what if you have SQL Server? We want to introduce you to Babelfish, a OSS solution based on PostgreSQL 13. Babelfish supports TDS network protocol, T-SQL language, and SQL extensions specific to SQL Server. However, it isn't that simple. In our talk, we'll cover the features ensuring compatibility with SQL Server, existing problems and ways to solve them. Bonus: we'll also share the story on how we added the Babelfish support in DBeaver using the JDBC driver from Microsoft.

Usage of temporary tables in PostgreSQL causes additional issues like high server resources consumption and low query performance. However, sometimes you need to rely on them especially when you need to migrate your code from MS SQL, and your initial code employed them, and you had some logic implemented at the database level. This talk covers issues related to usage of temporary tables when migrating from MS SQL, and the ways to resolve them using built-in PostgreSQL features based on the scenarios contained in the code.

This talk covers the Oracle-to-Postgres Pro migration project for the billing system of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “State Air Traffic Management Corporation of the Russian Federation” employed to collect the air navigation charges for the use of airspace.