PGConf.Russia 2025

The visibility map in PostgreSQL is an important mechanism for optimizing database performance, accelerating read operations, data cleanup, and indexing. Despite some limitations, such as memory consumption and fragmentation, its use can significantly enhance performance in high-load systems. Effective utilization of the visibility map requires proper configuration and monitoring, which is especially crucial in systems with large data volumes and high transaction concurrency.

In this talk, I will challenge architectural stereotypes about the impossibility of communication with external systems directly from a DBMS. PostgreSQL offers vast communication capabilities; you just need to know which extensions to use.

And when extensions aren't enough, you can create your own. For the Luxms BI project, we needed communication with NATS, so we developed our own extension in Rust. I’ll share the GitHub link and my experience of developing PostgreSQL extensions in Rust during this talk.

Sometimes, issues arise with the operation of PostgreSQL on Linux. We will define a classification of these scenarios and provide solutions, from simple to complex. Which failures lead to data corruption? Which scenarios are more dangerous than others, and what should be monitored? We will review logging examples from DBM.P Skala-R and analyze debugging scenarios, including OS libraries, Linux kernel, drivers, and kernel modules to identify causes and resolve errors.