PGConf.Russia 2025

Every day, thousands of engineers work tirelessly to make data more accurate, reliable, and up-to-date. But sometimes, we need to do the exact opposite—corrupt it.

Whether it’s masking or replacing sensitive information, or even generating entirely new datasets while preserving key business properties, data obfuscation is a crucial task. It’s essential for testing systems, sharing data with third parties, and more. However, given the complexity of data schemas and business logic, this is far from trivial.

In this talk, we’ll explore the challenges of working with artificial data and discuss various approaches to solving them using PostgreSQL’s built-in features and external extensions.

Poolers play a crucial role in PostgreSQL database operations. In this talk, we’ll discuss the challenges we faced when using and implementing existing poolers and the benefits we gained by developing our own pooler.

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.

In this session, we’ll provide an overview of the features of the pg_probackup3 backup utility. 

The new version has completely rethought the application architecture, introduced several long-awaited features, and added integration possibilities with other applications. We’ll dive into these updates and discuss them in detail during the presentation.