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PostgreSQL and related tasks on HighLoad ++



Watching the development of various databases is an exciting experience, especially if you understand undercurrents. One of the strongest communities around databases in Russia is the PostgreSQL community. Two thematic conferences per year, a consulting company and even a company that develops modules for PostgreSQL.

The head and ideologist of the international community, Bruce Momzhan, has been visiting HighLoad ++ for a year now . This year is no exception, Bruce will talk about “Upcoming PostgreSQL Features” —who will anyone tell about the future of this DBMS, if not Bruce?
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Why, in spite of such activity, this database is still far from being as common as, for example, MySQL “bazulka”. What's the catch? We actively discussed this topic at the PGDay'15 conference, which was organized by one of the speakers of HighLoad ++, Ilya Kosmodemyansky.

First, a little research:
  1. The largest paid CMS in Russia (Bitrix, Netcat, UMI) do not support PostgreSQL;
  2. The most popular free CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla), too (or hardly supported or supported recently);
  3. Only every third hosting provider offers support for PostgreSQL.


Accordingly, one of the most important channels for attracting neophytes into the community, namely, cultivating novices through simple projects, PostgreSQL does not use. This niche is heavily occupied by MySQL.

On the other hand, Yandex finds only three courses in PostgreSQL and several dozen in MySQL and Oracle. The latter also has serious support from the vendor, including an ecosystem of certifications that are convenient for employers. That is to learn PostgreSQL, even if you want, nowhere.

On the third hand, the PostgreSQL community has excellent internal events. But at general industry events, MySQL is significantly more represented than PostgreSQL. Recently, the situation has begun to improve, there are mitaps, but in general, the PostgreSQL community is using the weak channel to attract newbies.

It turns out that we have a good product, there is a strong community and an almost complete lack of activity to involve the masses.

The question arises - what makes PostgreSQL remarkable in all respects to recruit an army of fans? Just being wonderful is not enough!

My proposal to the community and the companies operating in it - PostgreSQL should be approached as a product, it should be sold ! To sell not in the sense of receiving money for it, but to involve people in using it. And this should be done not only among its loyal audience, but, first of all, among the new audience, not familiar with PostgreSQL.

The natural outcome of the position “we are satisfied with everything, including the speed of development” will be that on HeadHunter and further on one resume from PostgreSQL there will be 5 resumes from MySQL and 10 references from Oracle, as now.

Let's help a little community? A matter of karmic importance.

Past year


A couple of examples of reports from the two organizers of the two PostgreSQL conferences in Russia. These are the grants for HighLoad ++ !





This year




The reports on this year, and indeed, what is happening in the world of the PostgreSQL movement, will best be told by a member of the Program Committee, the organizer of numerous meetings on this DBMS, Nikolai Samokhvalov.

- The development of PostgreSQL over the past year and success?
The successes are very extensive. There is a high popularity, which continues to grow - both in the world and in Russia.

Last year’s release of PostgreSQL 9.4 made it possible to position this DBMS not only as a robust and productive relational system with rich capabilities, but now as a NoSQL system. Roughly speaking, if earlier competed with MySQL (and according to the trends of the last 5 years, we see that it is very successful), now with the new-fangled NoSQL-DBMS, in particular, with MongoDB. Moreover, the implementation of JSON-data types in Postgres allowed him to enter this niche immediately with the richest index support, reliable replication, predictable behavior and excellent performance. By the way, about the latter - the tests of many companies show that PostgreSQL looks more preferable.

In parallel in the world in recent years, another front has been systematically developing, where Postgres is playing - this is competition with industrial (Enterprise) level DBMS. There is such an opinion: as well as on the OS market, open systems (first of all, with the advent of Linux) took a firm place, in many ways, without losing at all - and often winning - commercial OS, and in the DBMS market. PostgreSQL is becoming more and more serious. At the same time, it has been around for many decades (the first commit to the project, in the form in which we know it, took place back in July 1996 ).

Therefore, it comes time for his confident game in medium and large companies.

- The value of PostgreSQL in Russia and the significance of HighLoad ++?
PostgreSQL is now of particular importance in Russia. For quite some time now the country lives in the conditions of sanctions. For these reasons, interest in PostgreSQL began to grow like an avalanche. I felt this last year, when, restarting our meetup group under the brand #PostgreSQLRussia , a few months later I was surprised to realize that we are now the 3rd largest in the world among all local communities in the world.

In this case, serious players entered the business. Postgres is increasingly being used in Yandex (by the way, one of the reports from Postgres Professional on Highload ++ will be about this experience), and large companies like Avito (Europe’s largest private ad service) there will be two reports) and Headhunter (a large job search site, at the conference they will talk about monitoring servers, including databases).

Representatives of state organizations and banks are also increasingly attending community meetings. Some of them are already using Postgres with all their might - I hope we will see the reports soon.

As for Highload ++, it so happened that for many years, in spite of everything, we have been able to “pull out” excellent foreign speakers. So this time we will see an excellent report on PostgreSQL - experts from Spain, Germany and the USA will arrive .

Of course, it is worth mentioning that there will be reports from representatives of two domestic companies whose business is entirely associated with Postgres - DBA-experts from PostgreSQL-Consuting.com and the rapidly growing team of Oleg Bartunov Postgres Professional. Each company will submit several reports at once.

Summing up, I want to say that the growing activity of PostgreSQL speakers at the Highload ++ conference is simply a reflection of the real growing interest in this system both in Russia and in the world.



From the Postgres Highload ++ Report 2015 you could easily create a one-day conference.
The program committee had a hard time - in this niche the competition of applications exceeded 3 reports per seat.

One of the main topics is PostgreSQL horizontal scaling. Three reports were selected for it at once:

Creating a reliable and efficient cluster is one of the main tasks assigned to Postgres Professional created earlier this year. The task is very voluminous and there is still much to be done, and it will be very interesting to hear how its solution is being advanced by the team assembled by Oleg Bartunov.

The conference frequenter, co-founder of the PostgreSQL project, Bruce Momzhan (Bruce Momjian), will tell visitors what the horizontal scaling problem is, what solutions exist in the Postgres ecosystem, and what to expect in the near future.



And finally, Alexey Klyukin from Europe’s largest online retailer Zalando SE ( ETR: ZAL ) will share his company's experience in scaling Postgres databases . Is it worth mentioning that the first-hand account of a solution based on Open Source, successfully used in a very large business, is extremely interesting.

Next to the topic of scaling apart is the report of the Spanish speaker Alvaro Hernandez (Alvaro Hernandez) "ToroDB: scaling PostgreSQL like MongoDB" . ToroDB is a PostgreSQL based DBMS that is compatible with MongoDB and can replace it in already created applications.

Very soon PostgreSQL 9.5 will be released, containing a number of great innovations and expected improvements. Review - in the report by Ilya Kosmodemyansky from PostgreSQL-Consulting “What's new and useful in PostgreSQL 9.5” .

Given the experience of Ilya, we should expect not just a listing, but a pragmatic and sober assessment of each new product from the point of view of DBA practice. For those who want to learn to quickly understand what is happening in Postgres in critical situations, why the base “slows down” and “who is to blame” - a report by Alexey Lesovsky (also PostgreSQL-Consulting) “Deep dive into PostgreSQL internal statistics” .

Yandex had few existing PostgreSQL monitoring tools. As a result, together with the developers from Postgres Professional, a special solution was created (of course, already available on Github), which will be discussed in Ildus Kurbangaliev 's report “Monitoring Expectations in PostgreSQL” .

And finally, a few more reports, affecting not only the DBMS, but also many components "around", from the experience of large projects:


And finally : For the users of Habrakhabr, the conference offers a special discount of 15%, all you need to do is use the code " IAmHabr " when booking tickets.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/268485/

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