PGConf.Russia 2023

A popular lecture with pictures illustrating the most powerful phenomena in the Universe that put space and time in an uncomfortable position and force them to reveal the secrets of the Universe to those who have an inquisitive mind and Postgres! The story of Mr. Lipunov, professor at Moscow State University, author of world-famous popular and scientific books, theorist, experimenter and creator of a network of astronomical robots.

A report on our experience of implementing PostgreSQL instead of Oralce in a highly loaded system with a microservice architecture that processes several terabytes of data. Let's talk about how we went from piloting Greenplum to moving to several interacting PosgreSQL databases with different load profiles, and about the problems we encountered in the process.

Historically PostgreSQL was intended to transactional OLTP workload. This thesis is confirmed by row-based kind of storage and impossibility (or some complication) in building distributed engine of query execution based on MPP principles. However, due to extensibility of PostgreSQL core (first of all, by using of pluggable access methods) and tolerant license policy similar to BSD there were appeared new different forks and extensions allowing effective processing of big data in analytical manner.

In current talk I'm going to review the PostgreSQL fork called Greenplum and Citus and TimescaleDB extensions from system developer's perspective by comparing their common analytical engine features: column storage, data compression, distributed query execution and so on. The results of such overview will be helpful to database architects seeking PostgreSQL-based DBMS for analytical workload.

One of the main needs of high-load database projects is a right configured load balancer within the database cluster. Most of the solutions I worked with, including Pgpool-II, could not fully suit business requirements. In this article me as a network engineer with broad experience will cover tricky configurations of the Pgpool-II operating in the “Master-Master” mode, as well as consider cases in which similar solutions are indispensable.