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.

As part of the import substitution process, we encountered the need to find a reliable alternative to Oracle. PostgreSQL was considered the primary candidate for replacement, but during the research, the "vanilla" version revealed a number of critical limitations that hindered a successful transition.

These issues included support for autonomous transactions, batch variables, and several other specifics. What is special about pg_settings? Why do we need autonomous transactions, and how do HOLD cursors relate to this? These and other topics will be discussed in our presentation, where we will also share our experience of implementing Postgres Pro Enterprise.

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.

In this session, we’ll provide an overview of the features of the pg_probackup3 backup utility. 

The new version has completely rethought the application architecture, introduced several long-awaited features, and added integration possibilities with other applications. We’ll dive into these updates and discuss them in detail during the presentation.