PGConf.Russia 2022

The volume of data stored in Postgres Pro databases is growing rapidly. In some organizations, such databases have already exceeded tens of terabytes in size. The existing approaches to backups don't ensure timely backup and restore of data in such cases. We have supplemented the well-known and well-tested Postgres Pro backup tools with functionality that will allow users to backup and restore large databases. In addition to that, we have created our solution with the convenience of DBAs in mind.

Disaster-tolerant cluster implies minimal data loss in the event of the main data center disaster and switching to the backup data center. The data loss takes place due to the asynchronous replication between the main data center and the backup one. However, there's a solution that can resolve the existing problem and ensure zero data loss in the case of the main data center disaster. My talk covers this solution for zero data loss.

The plv8 extension is very underestimated, though it can help simplify development for a variety of tasks. It's been a year since we started using this extension in our projects. The main reason for its low popularity is the complexity of building. Moreover, building plv8 requires a lot of traffic and disc space for temporary files. That's why we decided to build plv8 and provide ready-made binaries freely to anyone interested, not just as an offering for our customers. First, we made the binaries available on GitHub. Then we created a Docker image for Postgres with pre-installed plv8 based on Debian. It looked too heavy to us, and we decided to check Alpine, however, building it for Alpine appeared to be more complicated than we expected. I'll explain what difficulties we faced and how we managed to overcome them. I will also list the tasks that can be solved with plv8 and provide advice on how to make the development process more convenient. I will also share the links to our Docker images for the latest Postgres 13 and Postgres 14 releases, that are compact and can be used for any types of tasks.

This presentation is about NULLs implementation in the Postgres database: - What is NULL? - How is it handled by various Postgres functions? - How are NULLs stored in the database? - Indexing of NULLs