Understanding all the details of a High Availability PostgreSQL clusters is one of the most critical DBA knowledge area’s.
Instead of boring you with endless numbers of slides, with volunteer assistance from the audience, we will show you all important concepts like WAL transport, synch/async commit, RTO, RPO, network involvement etc with nothing more than a few decks of playing cards and some funny hats.Understanding all the details of a High Availability PostgreSQL clusters is one of the most critical DBA knowledge area’s.
A decade or two ago, VACUUM in PostgreSQL was a simple procedure that read an entire table and then removed no longer visible row versions from the table and its indexes. Every 200 million transactions, the table was traversed again to freeze old transaction numbers so the transaction counter wouldn’t overflow.
Over time, this seemingly simple procedure has been optimized. VACUUM now knows which pages to visit, both for vacuuming and freezing. Traversals can be accelerated by omitting indexes and TOAST tables. Various phases can utilize parallelization. Autovacuum now knows how to handle INSERT-only tables. Emergency freeze runs are far less intimidating than they used to be.
In this talk, we’ll explore these modern VACUUM features and show how DBAs can take advantage of the improved performance.
In PostgreSQL, managing schema changes without downtime can be a challenging task. Table-level locks, which control access during Data Definition Language (DDL) operations like ALTER or DROP TABLE, can result in unintended application slowdowns or even service interruptions when not fully understood. This talk will provide a comprehensive dive into table-level locking and lock queueing in PostgreSQL, helping attendees gain the insights they need to perform efficient schema changes.
We’ll start by explaining the various types of table-level locks in PostgreSQL such as Access Share, Exclusive, and Access Exclusive and how they are automatically managed during common DDL operations. Then, we’ll break down lock queuing: how PostgreSQL organizes lock requests, what happens when transactions wait for locks, and how deadlocks can arise in complex environments.
Next, we’ll focus on practical approaches to managing table-level locks for near-zero downtime. Attendees will learn techniques to minimize locking impact, including understanding lock conflicts, using online schema migration patterns, and identifying lock-heavy queries. We’ll introduce open-source tools like pgroll, which utilizes the expand/contract pattern to make schema changes in small, lock-free steps.
By the end of this session, attendees will be equipped with practical strategies and knowledge to control lock behavior during schema changes, ensuring data integrity and reducing operational disruptions. This talk will provide the tools needed to manage PostgreSQL schema changes with confidence and minimal impact on production environments.
CloudNativePG brings a native, Kubernetes-friendly approach to managing PostgreSQL databases in cloud-native environments, which fills a critical gap in the CNCF ecosystem. CloudNativePG offers seamless integration with Kubernetes to manage its lifecycle, including high availability, disaster recovery, and backup/restore functionalities.
The talk is an introduction on features and behaviours of CloudNativePG, the Kubernetes operator that covers the full lifecycle of a highly available PostgreSQL database cluster with a primary/standby architecture, using native streaming replication.
Discussed topics are:
– the operator CRD
– operand images and extensibility
– suggested architectures
– deployment (helm, manifest application…)
– monitoring (Prometheus metrics)
– most recent features, like volume snapshot backups/restore and declarative databases, publicatoins, subscriptions
Website: https://cloudnative-pg.io/
Discover how Redgate is extending its trusted, end-to-end database solutions to support PostgreSQL teams. In this keynote, we’ll introduce Redgate and highlight our newest PostgreSQL-focused solutions that help development, operations, and data teams streamline workflows, improve performance, and safeguard business-critical data.
Learn how solutions like Redgate Monitor, pgNow, Flyway, Redgate Test Data Manager, and pgCompare come together to support everything from monitoring and version control to test data management and schema comparison. Whether you’re scaling PostgreSQL adoption or looking to increase efficiency across your estate, Redgate makes it easier to deliver reliable, high-quality software—faster.
When a critical production database can’t service to majority of its users we can call this a “crisis”. These problems can show up in different forms like data corruptions, data loss arising from user fault, after change issues (upgrade, patch, migration etc.), hardware problems, load issues and more. It’s crucial to follow right direction for the solution when “downtime” starts ticking. While supporting big customer systems for many years, I experienced these “crisis” at first hand and prepared this presentation for PostgreSQL DBAs to get ready for these unwanted but possible cases.
This session will cover how to overcome the crisis situations with both technical and non-technical aspects just like behavioral approach, problem solving diplomacy, crisis management rules etc. We will start with example scenarios to understand and accept the risk in every condition. Then, we will cover how to prepare organizationally (preparing crisis management plan and technical procedures, performing periodic test etc.) and technically (best practices for scenarios like database backup/restore/recovery, failover, database upgrade/migration). At the last part there will be golden rules to follow, extracted from tens of real-life lessons learned.
People attending this session will enhance their readiness for any possible crisis situations on their database systems. This readiness must include both organizational and technical considerations and both sides will be explained by blending them.
Indices are the backbone of efficient data retrieval in PostgreSQL, but their impact on performance is a double-edged sword.
While they accelerate read operations, they can introduce overhead to write operations and consume valuable storage.
This talk delves into the nuances of PostgreSQL index performance, providing practical insights and actionable strategies for optimizing your database.
Whether you’re a seasoned DBA or a developer working with PostgreSQL, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to effectively manage indices and maximize the performance of your database tables.
This talk explores a new way to scale read-heavy PostgreSQL workloads through SQL query caching and incremental view maintenance (IVM). Attendees will learn how our dataflow-based engine enables low-latency reads using partial materialization, without modifying application code. Real-world examples and architectural deep-dives illustrate how teams can achieve significant performance gains with minimal operational overhead.
PostgreSQL is notorious for having a painful upgrade process. So much so that many users push PostgreSQL way past the end-of-life date, but it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk, I will take a tour through tools and tricks that a modern DBA can use to get PostgreSQL clusters upgraded with a minimum of hassle. What you need to look out for to ensure your upgrades go smooth like butter. With the correct procedures, upgrading your PostgreSQL cluster can be something to look forward to, rather than dreading it.
