Доклады

SQL/JSON committed, what's next?

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?

Updates? Who at all needs your updates?!!

We'll talk about the ways to change the database records without updates. To do this, we'll explore what's going on at the lowest level and see what can happen if we make changes in data files in different operation modes.

Looking at the modern PostgreSQL ecosystem as an Oracle DBA

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.

Tools for a PostgreSQL developer

About 7 years ago, I moved from Windows-only development lead by an irresistible desire to add some parts to PostgreSQL. In this talk, I would like to cover things that were not obvious to me when I started working with the source code, the PG build and testing system. I'm going to talk about the simplest issues - routine IDE tasks, navigation, build and release process, and similar stuff. What I will share isn't the one and only truth. Some topics might relate to dummy-level problems :) I would be glad if other developers also shared the secrets of their development life. We can arrange a discussion of grep vs IDE :)

Deploy, Setup, Support: how Postgres Pro works with VK Cloud Solutions

A cloud provider operates with lots of hardware resources and network entities. It's one thing when a company runs dozens of Postgres Pro instances in an isolated loop for internal tasks. And it’s quite a different story when a cloud provider renders services to B2B users and maintains solutions for 500+ large companies.

Vitaliy will tell how the VK Cloud Solutions cloud provider currently employs Managed Postgres Pro. He will also demonstrate the solution's architecture and cover the challenges faced while creating the Postgres Pro solution in our cloud.

Speeding up databases using non-traditional methods

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.

Building plv8: from a binary archive to a compact Docker image

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.

Temporal types and their usage

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.

Do you want to know what VACUUM has done?

This talk is about our work on detailed vacuum workload statistics collection by the statistics collector and about problem solutions and benefits it can provide.

Babelfish: PostgreSQL with SQL Server support

Tasks for migrations from the classic commercial DBMSs to open-source solutions are still relevant nowadays. Tools used to migrate Oracle applications to PostgreSQL has already proved to be efficient. But what if you have SQL Server? We want to introduce you to Babelfish, a OSS solution based on PostgreSQL 13. Babelfish supports TDS network protocol, T-SQL language, and SQL extensions specific to SQL Server. However, it isn't that simple. In our talk, we'll cover the features ensuring compatibility with SQL Server, existing problems and ways to solve them. Bonus: we'll also share the story on how we added the Babelfish support in DBeaver using the JDBC driver from Microsoft.

System evolution: from MVP to HighLoad (ex. Insurance App)

In June 2020, AlfaStrakhovaniye was obliged to use RSA 2.0 government services along with other insurance companies. It was the only way to sell car insurance in Russia. AlfaStrakhovaniye is a leader in car insurance, and its applications degraded under the pressure of calls. It wasn't planned. Postgres used a huge amount of CPU and memory. Nobody could tell what was going on. Degradation started and stopped for no reason. Dev Team and Postgres Pro experts solved that problem. MyBatis in Java services was the killer. Our story is about the development of applications for heavy workloads and technical ignorance while using frameworks.

NULLs in Postgres

This presentation is about NULLs implementation in the Postgres database: - What is NULL? - How is it handled by various Postgres functions? - How are NULLs stored in the database? - Indexing of NULLs

How the State Air Traffic Management Corporation of the Russian Federation migrated from Oracle to Postgres Pro

This talk covers the Oracle-to-Postgres Pro migration project for the billing system of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “State Air Traffic Management Corporation of the Russian Federation” employed to collect the air navigation charges for the use of airspace.

The Dark Side of “PostgreSQL Internals”

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.

Mamonsu monitoring agent: a brief tutorial

Mamonsu is an active monitoring agent for PostgresSQL based on Zabbix. We are actively developing the agent: there are new unique metrics and visualization capabilities. But in addition to metrics collecting mechanism, Mamonsu has other useful features. I am going to briefly describe these features also known as "Mamonsu tools", the agent's advantages and the installation process.

PostgreSQL 15: on the finish line

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.

Experience in using Live Universal Interface (LUI) and PostgreSQL in creating an analytical reporting system

The talk covers the use of PostgreSQL, LUI and LUI4ORA2PG for building an analytical reporting system.

The talk tackles the following topics:

• migration from an Oracle environment;
• application of JSON functions;
• how the temporary tables helped us;
• our own means for load testing and bottlenecks detection;
• how to make beautiful GeoJSON format maps to display diagrams on them;
• installation and testing of the system on an "Elbrus" computer;
• what became an obstacle or was missing when using PostgreSQL.

The history of growth of the Live Universal Interface (LUI) web application development tool and the LUI4ORA2PG migration tool can be found in our previous presentations at PGConf conferences:

https://pgconf.ru/2019/118109 ;

https://pgconf.ru/201911/264095 ;

https://pgconf.ru/2020/262456 ;

https://pgconf.ru/2021/288310 .

Introducing SPQR: Stateless Postgres Query Router

SPQR is a lightweight OLTP sharding solution written in Go. In this talk, I'm going to discuss design decisions that led us through FDW-based sharding, CustomNode-based sharding, C-implemented lightweight query routing, and finally to SPQR design.

Implementing failover of logical replication slots in Patroni

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.

Temporary tables as a legacy of the transition from MS SQL. Problems, optimization, approaches

Usage of temporary tables in PostgreSQL causes additional issues like high server resources consumption and low query performance. However, sometimes you need to rely on them especially when you need to migrate your code from MS SQL, and your initial code employed them, and you had some logic implemented at the database level. This talk covers issues related to usage of temporary tables when migrating from MS SQL, and the ways to resolve them using built-in PostgreSQL features based on the scenarios contained in the code.