PGConf.Russia 2025

Covering all the key changes in PostgreSQL 18 during this talk would be quite a challenge — especially since the code freeze is set to happen just a week after the presentation. However, I’ll focus on what has already been finalized.

There are plenty of exciting updates in performance, monitoring, vacuuming (of course!), and beyond. As always, this talk is based on a series of articles reviewing the commit fests for PostgreSQL 18, published on Postgres Professional’s corporate blog on Habr.

In this talk, we’ll:

• Share our experience of reworking the ECM system and platform that was originally built on C.Net + MS SQL for Windows to run on Linux + Postgres, while maintaining the option to install and operate on Windows + MS.

• Discuss migrating clients to new platforms with data migration.

• Share insights from operating the system with a high-load client (PG servers with 192 cores and 3 TB of RAM).

t’s well known that pg_upgrade is the go-to tool for fast PostgreSQL upgrades. However, even with this tool, there are cases where the upgrade process takes far longer than expected.

In our case, upgrading a PostgreSQL database with 350,000 tables meant either waiting 3.5 hours or finding a better approach. By digging into the pg_upgrade source code, we discovered a way to speed up the process significantly. In this talk, we’ll share how we did it.

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.