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.

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.

For DBAs, ensuring database protection and integrity is always a top priority. Along with that comes the need to store data efficiently and compactly, without overloading the network, and ensuring reliable recovery.

In this talk, we’ll discuss a universal solution for backup and archive storage that not only offers effective deduplication but also minimizes network load. TATLIN.BACKUP is a platform for storing PostgreSQL backups or WAL archives with compression, deduplication, and minimal data transmission over the network.

TATLIN.BACKUP is a versatile solution for transferring and storing PostgreSQL archives at remote locations from a central office.

In this talk, we will discuss what character encodings and collations are. I will explain the issues that can arise from sorting (COLLATION) in databases and show how these problems can be addressed using the COLLATION PROVIDER = ICU feature in PostgreSQL.