PGConf.Russia 2022

As opposed to in-memory DBMSs, traditional disc database management systems have an inherent physical limitation. It's their storage system which is by several orders of magnitude slower than CPU operation memory, even in the case of All-Flash NVM. It becomes especially critical for the development of business analytics apps and OLAP scenarios on disc DBMS. We will consider a number how-tos for improving the performance of traditional DBMSs, and then offer a new storage-centric approach to hardware-based speed-up for disc DBMSs.

I am going to explain a sorting method added in Postgres 14 that allows to create GiST index much faster. We'll also talk about the disadvantages of this sorting method discovered during implementation of its support in PostGIS and how it will be improved in the future. Also, new features and improvements included in PostGIS 3.2 will be reviewed.

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.

A book. Typically a reader sees only the final product, printed on paper or opened on a computer screen. In this talk I invite you to take a look at the dark side of my recently published “PostgreSQL Internals” book. Come if you are curious why the author would want to write scripts, modify the PostgreSQL source code, and program pictures.