PostgreSQL and its related tasks in HighLoad ++

Watching the development of different databases is a fascinating activity, especially if you understand the undercurrents. One of the strongest communities around the DBMS in Russia is the PostgreSQL community. Two thematic conferences a year, a consulting company and even a PostgreSQL module development company.

The leader and ideologist of the international community, Bruce Momjan, has been coming to us for HighLoad ++ for a year now . This year is no exception, Bruce will talk about “Upcoming PostgreSQL Features” - who should tell about the future of this DBMS, if not to Bruce?

Why, despite such activity, this database is still far from being as widespread as, for example, the MySQL “bazulka”. What's the catch? We actively discussed this topic at the PGDay'15 conference, which was organized by one of the HighLoad ++ speakers Ilya Kosmodemyansky.

To start, 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 (either support with difficulty or support recently);
3. Only every third hosting provider offers PostgreSQL support.

Accordingly, PostgreSQL does not use one of the most important channels for attracting neophytes into the community, namely the cultivation of beginners through simple projects. This niche is tightly 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 significant support from the vendor, including an ecosystem of certifications suitable for employers. That is, there is nowhere to learn PostgreSQL, even if you want.

Thirdly, the PostgreSQL community has great internal events. But at general industry events, MySQL is significantly more represented than PostgreSQL. Recently, the situation began to improve, mitaps appeared, but in general, the PostgreSQL community uses poorly this channel for attracting newcomers.

It turns out that we have a good product, a strong community, and an almost complete absence of activities to engage the masses.

The question arises - due to which PostgreSQL, which is wonderful in all respects, will gain an army of fans? Just being wonderful is not enough!

My suggestion is to the community and companies operating in it - PostgreSQL should be approached as a product, it must be sold ! Selling is not in the sense of receiving money for it, but involving people to use it. And you need to do this not only among your loyal audience, but, first of all, among the new audience that is not familiar with PostgreSQL.

The logical outcome of the position “everything suits us, including the speed of development” will be that HeadHunter and then one resume with PostgreSQL will have 5 resumes with MySQL and 10 mentions with Oracle, as it is now.

Will we help the community a bit? A matter of karmic importance.

Last years

A couple of examples of reports from the two organizers of two PostgreSQL conferences in Russia themselves. These are the greats on HighLoad ++ !

This year

The reports for this year, and indeed about what is happening in the world of the PostgreSQL-movement, are best described by the member of the Program Committee, the organizer of numerous meetings on this DBMS Nikolay Samokhvalov.

- The development of PostgreSQL over the past year and success?

Success is very vast. There is a high popularity, which continues to grow - both in the world and in Russia.

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

In parallel, in the world in recent years, another front has been systematically developing, where Postgres plays - this is competition with the DBMS of an industrial (Enterprise) level. There is such an opinion: as in the OS market, open systems (in the first place, with the advent of Linux) once occupied a strong place, in many ways without losing - and often winning - with commercial OSs, as well as in the DBMS market. PostgreSQL is gaining more and more serious capabilities. Moreover, it is for many decades (the first commit to the project in the form in which we know it took place in July 1996 ).

Therefore, the time comes for his confident play in medium and large companies.

- The value of PostgreSQL in Russia and the importance of HighLoad ++?

PostgreSQL now has a special meaning in Russia. Recently, the country has been living under sanctions. For these reasons, interest in PostgreSQL began to grow like an avalanche. I felt this last year when, after restarting our meetup-group under the brand name #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.

At the same time, serious players entered the business. Yandex is increasingly using Postgres (by the way, oneof the reports from Postgres Professional on Highload ++ will include about this experience), he is entrusted with his business by such large companies as Avito (Europe’s largest private ad service, there will be two reports from them) and Headhunter (a large job search site, at the conference they will talk about monitoring servers, including databases).

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

As for Highload ++, it so happened that for many years, no matter what, 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 come .

Of course, it is worth mentioning that there will also be reports from representatives of two domestic companies whose business is wholly connected with Postgres - DBA experts from PostgreSQL-Consuting.com and the fast-growing team of Oleg Bartunov Postgres Professional. Each company will present 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 really growing interest in this system both in Russia and in the world.

From Postgres reports Highload ++ 2015, you could easily create a one-day conference.
The program committee had a hard time - in this niche the call for proposals exceeded 3 reports per place.

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

• Oleg Bartunov, Alexander Korotkov, Fedor Sigaev, Postgres Professional. Cluster saga . All you wanted to know about horizontal scaling in Postgres
• Bruce Momjian. The Future of Postgres Sharding
• Alexey Klyukin, Zalando. Spilo , PostgreSQL Failover Cluster

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

A conference regular, co-founder of the PostgreSQL project, Bruce Momjian, will tell visitors what the task of horizontal scaling is, what solutions exist in the Postgres ecosystem and what to expect in the near future.



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

Along with the topic of scaling, the report of the Spanish speaker Alvaro Hernandez, “ToroDB: scaling PostgreSQL like MongoDB”, stands apart . ToroDB is a PostgreSQL-based DBMS that is compatible with MongoDB and can replace it in existing applications.

PostgreSQL 9.5 is coming soon, featuring a number of great innovations and expected improvements. Review - in the report of Ilya Kosmodemyansky from PostgreSQL-Consulting "What's New and Useful in PostgreSQL 9.5" .

Considering the experience of Ilya, one should expect not just a listing, but a pragmatic and sober assessment of each new item from the point of view of DBA practice. For those who want to learn how to quickly understand what is happening in “Postgres” in critical situations, why the database “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 the report by Ildus Kurbangaliev “Monitoring expectations in PostgreSQL” .

And finally, a few more reports that affect not only the DBMS, but also many of the components “around”, from the experience of large projects:

• Sergey Burladyan from Avito, in his report “Implementing Disaster Recovery,” will share his many years of experience as a database administrator and IT infrastructure administrator for Europe’s largest private announcement service.
• His colleague Mikhail Tyurin will present an architectural report on Avito's “giblets” - “Where do your ads live?”
• The hh.ru Operations Director Nikolay Sivko in his report “Monitoring all layers of a web project” will describe the experience of covering “smart” schedules and alerts of a highly loaded web service.

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