PGConf.SPB 2023

During the years of its existence, Postgres Pro piled up a pool of problems when query execution was inappropriately slow or a query was too expensive to be executed, so it was never executed. Almost always in our practice, this was due to the choice of a non-optimal query plan. In our story, we will talk about a very unconventional attempt to solve this problem by re-planning queries. We will tell you what it is, how it works, who will find it helpful and the prospects for using this feature.

Traditionally, fault tolerance in Postgres is implemented using built-in replication mechanisms and external utilities that monitor the state of running Postgres instances and react accordingly when various failures occur. In this presentation, I will tell you what we like and what we don’t like about this approach, which alternative we see, what we have been able to achieve to date and what we want to get done by the time of release, which is planned for December.

Postgres Pro is investing heavily to make it easy for customers to migrate to their database from Oracle Database.

This talk describes in detail the advanced Postgres Pro DBMS technologies designed to solve this problem:

• support for package functionality in PL/pgSQL, including the package initialization section and global package variables;
• ora2pgrpo utility for automatic conversion of package code from Oracle PL/SQL syntax to PL/pgSQL;
• PG Pro Application Info extension designed for instrumentation and monitoring of the state of sessions, including the execution of long operations (session longops) - a functional analogue of the package DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO in Oracle DBMS;
• new system packages UTL_MAIL and UTL_SMTP for sending emails from stored procedures to Postgres Pro DBMS (full functional analogue of the corresponding packages in Oracle DBMS);
• new system package UTL_HTTP for interacting with external sources from stored procedures in Postgres Pro DBMS (analogous to the package of the same name in Oracle DBMS);

Also in this talk there will be a short story about the directions of development of the Postgres Pro DBMS aimed at further simplifying migration from Oracle DBMS.

An important aspect of PostgreSQL database security and reliability is backup practices. The talk will reveal the main techniques and methods used to protect data, prevent loss and successfully recover information in case of human error, failures or emergencies. We will tell how CyberBackup helps to protect PostgreSQL, including configuration in Patroni cluster: we will consider system deployment options, important aspects of backup policy configuration, including full and incremental backups. We will also show how to easily work with backups via mount and do granular restores.