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.

Logical decoding and replication slots introduced in PostgreSQL 9.4 (released in 2014) created a solid foundation for implementing built-in core logical replication in version 10 (released in 2017). Unfortunately, there are a few limitations that make logical replication not very useful in real-world scenarios. Logical decoding currently isn’t supported on the standby server, and PostgreSQL allows creating logical replication slots only on the primary server. Or in other words, logical slots are lost on failover/switchover.

Postgres hackers made many attempts to address the problem, and most of them resulted in not too much success. Although, there is one little function introduced in PostgreSQL 11 that made it possible to implement failover of logical replication slots externally.

In my talk I will tell a story of how Patroni solves the problem of logical replication slots failover without using invasive third-party extensions, dig down into some of the Postgres internals in order to prove why this approach is safe, and finally, we will discuss limitations and potential downsides of this solution.

A modern database should be capable of storing big values. Storing itself is not a big deal, however, operations with big values or fields are a non-trivial task. PostgreSQL has several options for storing big values, but none of them is perfect. How do we respond to this challenge? Our presentation answers this question, let's see how to store big and complex values in Postgres properly, and how operate with them.