PGConf.Russia 2025

What does a modern application developer need to transition from familiar cloud-based solutions to SQL databases?

This talk is a practical report on how we transformed an SQL database into a NoSQL-like solution with a developer-friendly interface. We’ll discuss:

What application developers expect from a data framework

How to implement declarative DDL, access control, and automation for reading and writing data

Simplified DML operations, pagination, and other essential features for application development

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.

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 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.