PGConf.Russia 2025

Where I used to work, we had pushed ElasticSearch to its breaking point. We needed an even more scalable replacement for a write-heavy, read-seldom workload. So we built one on PostgreSQL. Now, many of us are building the successor as an open source project. 

This talk goes over the design of Bagger (named after the giant mining machines), which can manage logs into tens or hundreds of petabytes. More than just a review of the architecture, this talk focuses on the whys and the tradeoffs made in the design. 

The talk is intended both to showcase how programmable and powerful PostgreSQL is, but also illustrate the fundamental tradeoffs which must be faced when pushing any technology into the big data space.

Over the past year, pgpro_redefinition has undergone significant enhancements. In this talk, we’ll review the key updates, improvements, and new capabilities that have been introduced.

This talk explores the challenges we encountered — and solved — while migrating massive databases from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

One of the most complex aspects of this process was rebuilding foreign keys (FKs). To overcome these challenges, we had to dive deep into the internal workings of FK creation and validation.

Key topics include:

Does ALTER TABLE ... ADD CONSTRAINT ... FOREIGN KEY have an execution plan?

Can an ordinary user influence this process?

What locks are applied during FK creation and validation?

Also, we’ll introduce a first-principles method for investigating performance issues, applying it to a real-world FK creation bottleneck.

For over a year, Postgres Pro has provided extended vacuum statistics, reflecting its operation on individual relations.

We've started receiving observations from production databases of clients that include these statistics. It has been quite successful, and in 2024, we began actively promoting vacuum statistics in PostgreSQL. In this talk, we will review what these statistics can tell us about the complex life of vacuum, using real-world data from live systems.