PGConf.Russia 2025

Although we often don't like to talk about it, database administration carries with it a large amount of stress. This is particularly true when we have to take on late night support duties. In this talk you will learn: 1. The basics of the physiology of stress. This is not a physiology lecture, but as engineers we need enough to build a mental model. 2. What kinds of mistakes we make when under stress. 3. How to measure stress in your own life and recognize it in others. 4. What tools are helpful to manage short- and long-term stressors. Managing short-term stress is important in avoiding becoming overwhelmed when problems occur, but managing longer-term stressors is just as important in avoiding problems in the first place.

Currently, WAL files can be compressed with a ratio of up to 6x, but the existing compression system is inefficient.

In this talk, I’ll share my work on improving WAL compression.

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.

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.