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.

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.

Replication is one of the important mechanisms designed to provide database fault tolerance and scalability. In our practice, we regularly encounter the problem of low replication performance. This prompted us to investigate the factors that affect the speed of physical replication. In this presentation, I will talk about our findings. I will also demonstrate the differences in replication performance for various versions of PostgreSQL.

My talk covers PostgreSQL infrastructure in Ozon: - how do we tune virtual machines (KVM); - which version control system we have created; - which drivers we make and how it relates to fault tolerance and load balancing; - how do we make "hot" upgrades for the parameters of our virtual machines.