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.

Databases are a core component of any information system, and query performance directly impacts overall efficiency.

Last year, we explored suboptimal queries and optimization techniques, and the topic proved highly relevant. In this second installment, we’ll cover:

Using extended statistics for computed columns

Pagination techniques for improved query handling

Real-world optimization examples from 1C

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 2024, Postgres Professional introduced pgpro-otel-collector, a new tool for gathering PostgreSQL telemetry data using OpenTelemetry technologies and standards.

In this talk, I’ll explain why we chose OpenTelemetry, showcase the features of pgpro-otel-collector, and demonstrate how it helps streamline telemetry collection within a monitoring infrastructure.