PGConf.Russia 2025

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.

This talk will explore different approaches to storing files in PostgreSQL, including:

• Simple table-based storage

• Large objects with pg_largeobject

• pgpro_sfile – a large object (pgpro_bfile) storage solution

Dozens of PostgreSQL instances have replaced a single large Oracle database. One of our key business systems was completely redesigned and rebuilt on an import-independent solution.  

This talk will cover the unique challenges, architecture, issues, and operational aspects of this migration. Expect an insightful deep dive into the process!

Making changes to tables under production load is always a complex task. For example, when you need to change a column type (e.g., from int to bigint or from timestamp to timestamptz), or move a table to a different tablespace without losing any changes that occur during the data migration.

What if you have hundreds of such tables? With pg-transparent-alter-table, this is no longer a problem. These tasks can be solved with a single simple command:
$ pg_tat -h 0.0.0.0 -d mydb -c "alter table mytable alter column id bigint"

Key features include:

• You can specify any number of alter table commands at once.
• You can modify partitioned tables, supporting both the old inheritance-based partitioning and new declarative partitioning, including multi-level partitioning.
• You can interrupt the process at any stage and continue later without losing progress from previous stages.
• You can change your mind at any time, stop the execution, run "pg_tat --clean," and revert to the original state.
• Custom commands for changing column order.
• PostgreSQL version support: 11-17.

After more than 5 years of existence (previously called transparent-alter-type), the project has become a reliable tool actively used in production. I would like to share my experience and discuss its capabilities.