PGConf.Russia 2025

So much has been said about PostgreSQL as the result of its program code. But Postgres is not just code. It’s the people who create it, develop it, and... leave a piece of themselves through comments.

What stories can we uncover from the comments in PostgreSQL’s code? We’ll discover what the most popular word is, which comments have been in the code since the very first public commit, how the style of communication has evolved with the product, and how we can see the human side behind the lines of code and comments.

Experience Report addressing the manual migration of MS SQL Server Stored Procedures and Table-Valued Functions to PL/pgSQL. We chose a manual migration from T-SQL over using a PostgreSQL Extension with an automated translation. The motivation was that the T-SQL code contains non-trivial business logic for which we wanted idiomatic PL/pgSQL code. 

The T-SQL Code used features like 

• Mix of Stored Procedures and Table-valued Functions

• Table variables, (user-defined) table types 

• Recursive Common Table Expressions 

• Optional parameters 

The migration required

• Adopting naming conventions 

• Renaming parameters and local variables 

• Maping table types 

• Mapping table-valued parameters to arrays 

• Mapping table-valued return types to SETOF record

• Translating between arrays and tables 

In this session we will migrate a chain of dependend functions T-SQL functions to PL/pgSQL. We will work around quirks in both T-SQL functions and PL/pgSQL.

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.

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.