PGConf.Russia 2022

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.

During my career, I've seen a lot of code, and very often I faced inaccuracies in handling dates and times. Sometimes the parties got discrepancies in the monthly reports due to such inaccuracies; or daily reports were different for Moscow and SFO, etc. I wouldn't call it a serious problem, but it's annoying and time-consuming. In all cases, such issues occur because of neglectful handling of dates and times. In my presentation, I will discuss how we can avoid it.

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.

The release cycle for version 15 is nearing completion. At the time of the presentation, the complete list of changes will not be known. But for sure there will be something to talk about.