PGConf.Russia 2025

There are many administrator consoles out there, ranging from the old-school DBeaver to the ubiquitous pgAdmin. However, we decided to create another one. Why?

In this talk, you’ll learn:

• How can a single installation manage tens of thousands of database instances.

• How many users can the console support.

• How can you inventory your infrastructure without losing your sanity.

• How do you integrate into an existing environment without starting from scratch.

• How to build a security model that earns the trust of leading banks and telecom operators.

• How can you get hands-on experience with all of this.

As part of the import substitution process, we encountered the need to find a reliable alternative to Oracle. PostgreSQL was considered the primary candidate for replacement, but during the research, the "vanilla" version revealed a number of critical limitations that hindered a successful transition.

These issues included support for autonomous transactions, batch variables, and several other specifics. What is special about pg_settings? Why do we need autonomous transactions, and how do HOLD cursors relate to this? These and other topics will be discussed in our presentation, where we will also share our experience of implementing Postgres Pro Enterprise.

In any business-critical system, there comes a need to modify table structures — whether it's adding new columns with expressions based on other columns or converting a non-partitioned table into a partitioned one.

Using standard PostgreSQL tools for large table reorganization often results in significant downtime, as tables become unavailable for writes — and sometimes even for reads — during the process.

In this talk, I’ll introduce dbms_redefinition, a custom-built extension that brings functionality similar to Oracle’s DBMS_REDEFINITION package to PostgreSQL. This solution minimizes downtime to near zero when applying schema changes in production. 

Unlike pg_repack, which does not support structural modifications, dbms_redefinition is useful for all PostgreSQL users, even beyond Oracle migrations.

I’ll share a real-world use case, discuss future development plans, and explore new features in the pipeline.

Not a PgBouncer, But a Connection Pooler. Not Odyssey, But with Coroutines

If you’ve ever set up a high-availability PostgreSQL cluster, you’ve likely faced the challenge of redirecting traffic to the primary node after a failover.

Typically, this requires additional software to monitor cluster status and reroute traffic accordingly. To avoid a single point of failure, you may have had to implement failover handling within that layer. Additionally, you might have encountered PostgreSQL’s limitations on handling large numbers of concurrent client sessions, necessitating query pooling.

To solve these issues, we developed Proxima — a scalable, fault-tolerant proxy and connection pooler. Proxima automatically redirects traffic to the primary node and, in BiHA setups, seamlessly switches to a new primary in case of failure.

In this talk, I’ll cover why and how we built Proxima, the key architectural decisions behind the extension, and the

implementation details that enable it to handle 10,000+ concurrent client sessions.

We’ll also explore use cases and answer your questions.