PGConf.Russia 2025

This talk addresses a common issue and touches a bit on application architecture. Temporary tables in database applications are typically used for several purposes. 

Firstly, they are used to store intermediate results when implementing complex data processing algorithms. Secondly, in the case of stored procedures, application servers often place large datasets into temporary tables when they are too large or inconvenient to pass as parameters to stored procedures. 

The handling of temporary tables in different DBMSs is implemented in various ways, which often complicates migration from these systems to Postgres. 

The drawbacks of temporary tables are well-known, which leads to a reasonable desire to replace them, where possible, with other methods that can achieve the same goal. This talk focuses on alternative mechanisms provided by Postgres to solve this problem.

Currently, WAL files can be compressed with a ratio of up to 6x, but the existing compression system is inefficient.

In this talk, I’ll share my work on improving WAL compression.

A brief presentation on various extensions that can assist with optimization.

Last year, we introduced built-in fault tolerance support in Postgres Pro Enterprise through BiHA. Our solution allows you to deploy a fault-tolerant Postgres cluster where, in the event of a failure of the primary node, a new primary node (leader) is automatically selected.

However, this brings up the issue of redirecting traffic to the new leader. This can be solved using our Proxima extension or an external TCP proxy server. Both solutions needed to periodically query the BiHA cluster to determine the primary node.

As an alternative, the latest version of BiHA introduced the ability to register custom functions that will be triggered by events such as leader change, node addition/removal, and others. We call this mechanism user callbacks. In this presentation, we’ll explain how the callbacks are implemented and discuss their usage.