Friday February 2 I attended the FOSDEM PgDay; as the name suggests it’s a day dedicated to Posgres… stuff, just before the FOSDEM conference. There was also the PostgreSQL devroom during FOSDEM on Sunday, and a PostgreSQL stand in the exhibition area for the entire duration of the event as well.
Talks!!1!
First up was Joe Conway, Head of the PostgreSQL Contributors Team at Amazon RDS, on “Collation Challenges - Sorting it Out”. Joe has been involved with the PostgreSQL community since 1998, presently as a PostgreSQL Committer, Major Contributor, and Infrastructure Team member. Needless to say he has seen things. And now we have too. Derk actually referenced Joe’s version upgrades connected to EOL versions stories in his talk.
Derk van Veen, PostgreSQL DBA at Adyen, and Boriss Mejias, PostgreSQL Solutions Architect at EDB, talked about how to investigate performance problems when the standby can’t keep up. The story is an actual case study they debugged together with a group of excellent experts.
The journey to explaining the database performance problems Derk was seeing at Adyen was interesting, but Derk is still convinced that “solutions are usually rather underwhelming, considering the time you spend on finding them”. In other words: it’s about the lessons learned and how you go about addressing an anomaly. I love this quote: “You can collect all the data in the world from the debug tools you have at your disposal. But what is good enough debugging?”
OS updating is usually a surefire way to avoid issues but after Joe’s presentation, Derk doesn’t believe updates are that unscary.
Migrating to a new database system can be daunting, but armed with the right strategies, you can mitigate risks and ensure a successful transition. Hariram Thirukarugavur Ramesh, Product Manager for Azure PostgreSQL migrations and partner ecosystems, shared some of those strategies with us.
He also explored the Microsoft’s Postgres story:
- PostgreSQL core & Citus Open Source - Microsoft contributes to PG open source and the Citus open source extension
- Azure database for PostgreSQL - Fully managed database service for PostgreSQL
- PG Community - Efforts to foster growth & knowledge of the community
- Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL - Service powered by Citus extension
- PG Ecosystem - Extensions and tooling including migration tooling (ha!)
There are several migration tools available: Azure Database Migration Service, pg_dump and pg_restore, pgloader, ora2pg, striim… Hariram gave us a tour of pgcopydb, which he described as “pg_dump and pg_restore on steroids”.
pgcopydb is open source, has online/offline mode, is fully parallelized, and has good connectors in the marketplace. It’s actively maintained (by Hariram’s colleague at Microsoft), with 40 new features in 12 months and 180+ bugfixes in that same time period.
Lastly I really loved the interaction between Stephen Frost, CTO at Crunchy Data, and Vik Fearing, PostgreSQL Expert at EDB, during Stephen’s session “Advanced SQL- Do you know all SQL can do?”. Vik knows better than anyone in the room what’s part of the Standard and what’s not, being a SQL Standards Committee Member since September 2022.
And the amazing @Henrietta_Dombrovska gave me a copy of her PostgreSQL Query Optimization book signed by the authors!
What’s next?
The location for the 2024 PGConf was announced; the largest Postgres conference in the world will be held in Athens, Greece, on October 22–25.
We’re really making headway with PGDay Texel (
). What started as a joke when I got prompted to organize a Postgres event in the Netherlands maybe (and the assumption was that it would take place in Amsterdam, not one of the islands), got some folks interested. So I guess this is happening?!