PGConf.Russia 2025

This talk will explore different approaches to storing files in PostgreSQL, including:

• Simple table-based storage

• Large objects with pg_largeobject

• pgpro_sfile – a large object (pgpro_bfile) storage solution

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.

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.

The execution time of SQL queries depends on factors like indexes and up-to-date statistics. In most cases, optimizing slow queries helps resolve database performance issues.

But what if classic query optimization doesn’t work? What if the system keeps behaving unpredictably — or worse, crashes, leading to frustration, panic, and even despair?

In this talk, we’ll explore how Postgres Professional’s performance engineers tackle these challenges, look at the tools they use, what’s still missing, and where PostgreSQL performance optimization is headed