What's next in Logical Replication?

Logical replication has been there since 10.0 and with each release, it is getting better. This talk will start with the basic architecture of Logical replication in PostgreSQL and then cover the various ways in which it can be helpful to users.

One of the shortcomings of logical replication as compare to physical replication is that currently, it allows the transaction to be replicated only once it is committed. This can create a large apply lag on the subscriber side for long-running transactions. We will discuss the solution implemented for this problem for PostgreSQL.

We will also discuss the other major work being done in logical replication which is to allow the streaming of transactions at the prepare time. This will help us in implementing conflict-free logical replication. This can be used for scaling-out reads as well. Because of 2PC, we can ensure that on subscribers we have all the data committed on the master. Now, we can design a system where different nodes are owners of some set of tables and we can always get the data of those tables reliably from those nodes, and then one can have some external process that will route the reads accordingly.

In the end, this will cover the new enhancements, improvements related to Logical Replication in recent PostgreSQL releases.

Inside JSONB

JSONB is a popular data type in Postgres, and there is demand from users to improve its performance. In particular, we want to optimize a typical pattern of using jsonb as a storage for relatively short metadata and big blobs, which is currently highly inefficient. We will discuss several approaches to jsonb improvement and present the results of our experiments.

Managing PostgreSQL with Ansible

Ansible is an open-source configuration management and deployment tool, which can be used to manage servers and software installations. This talk will briefly cover Ansible itself, and then explain how Ansible is used to install and configure PostgreSQL on a server. Examples will round up the talk.

How-to obfuscate Postgres database for load testing in web apps

Postgres is a well-known database for high load web applications. Such apps require stress/load testing itself to run properly in production. Besides obvious difficulties in preparation a test environment identical to production, generating proper traffic there is another one issue - database preparation for the test environment. And it seems it is not good to use the database from production in the testing environment in the era of personal data protection (GDPR, HIPAA). Data obfuscation is the rescue.

There are few instruments for data obfuscation in Postgres. During this session, I will tell you which of them we've selected and why what type of issues we faced, and if our solution was successful. You will know if it is possible to get an identical response on the test database without real data from production, we will observe some restriction on obfuscation, I'll present our utility which simplify things.