PGConf.Russia 2022

Many books end with a wedding, but the reader has no idea about the future life of the heroes except that they lived happily ever after. In 2019, we successfully migrated distributed our railway application from Oracle 11g SE to vanilla PostgreSQL 11.9. But our story did not end with this successful migration - life went on, and sometimes we got startled because of "surprises". We encountered a number of problems, some of which were solved by reorganizing the data, some disappeared after we changed our stored procedures, and some got resolved after tuning the PostgreSQL parameters. Solving our problems would be impossible without the logging and profiling system built into our DB application. Our talk covers the examples of successful detection and resolving of the performance issues that occurred in our PostgreSQL-based application.

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.

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.

In this presentation, we'll talk about the newest SQL/JSON features committed to PostgreSQL 15. We'll explain how to use them, where they can help and why they make a difference. Is PostgreSQL JSON implementation fully compliant with SQL:2016? In the meantime, the next generation of the SQL standard is being developed. What will the new standard include, and how will Postgres respond to it?