PostgresConf US 2018 Program

presented by James Finnerty

In this training session we will be combining an extended deep dive on the Aurora architecture along with a hands on lab using Aurora PostgreSQL. As part of the deep dive we will cover the unique features and changes that combine to produce improved scalability, availability and durability. In addition, you will get hands on experience creating an Aurora PostgreSQL cluster, configuring that clu...

presented by Bruce Momjian

This talk is designed for PostgreSQL administrators. It covers all aspects of PostgreSQL administration, including installation, security, file structure, configuration, reporting, backup, daily maintenance, monitoring activity, disk space computations, and disaster recovery. It shows how to control host connectivity, configure the server, find the query being run by each session, and find th...

presented by Thomas Limoncelli

Whether you are a dba, sysadmin, dev, or ops, time management can be more difficult than any technology issue. This class is for new and junior system admins that have found themselves over their head, overloaded, and looking for a better way to survive the tech world.

This tutorial presents fundamental techniques for eliminating interruptions and distractions so you have more time for proje...

presented by Alexis Guajardo and Gabi Ferrara

Learn about containerized application management and managed database services by quickly developing a web-based application using Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL. Kubernetes Engine enables rapid application development and iteration by making it easy to deploy, update and manage your applications and services. Cloud SQL makes it easy to set up, manage, and administer your Postgres dat...

presented by Alvaro Hernandez and Pablo González Doval

It’s 3am. Your phone rings. PostgreSQL is down, you need to promote a replica to master. Why the h**l isn’t this automatic?

If you thought of this before, you want automatic High Availability (HA). Don’t miss this tutorial! We will enter the world of Modern PostgreSQL HA.

Good news, there are several new, “modern” solutions for PostgreSQL HA. However, there are several solutions and it's ...

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

Interact with your fellow attendees while having something to eat.

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

Interact with your fellow attendees while having something to eat.

presented by Mark Porter

Come hear what Amazon has planned for PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, and how we are working with the open source community. You’ll hear about how Amazon is helping customers move from commercial databases to open source ones (especially our favorite elephant-based database) and how we are working to re-think databases to have all the best features of a utility in terms of availability, durability, ...

presented by Scott Yara

With Big Data, Cloud, “Software’s Eating the World”, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Transformation and every other technology trend – there is one constant: data. Data has been, and will continue to be, at the heart of technology innovation and progress. Data and the associated gathering and analysis gives companies, organizations, governments, and individuals the opportunity to tell the stor...

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

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presented by Will Leinweber

Of all my regrets while building database-backed applications, not fully embracing database constraints sooner is one of the bigger ones. For far too long, I treated the db as a little more than a dumb key-value store with joins.

Strong constraints turn your database into the last line of defense against bad data. Applications change several orders of magnitude more often than db schemas, a...

presented by Tim Gorman

Data masking, also known as data obfuscation, is likely to become a new legal requirement in the near future. Masking is the solution for non-production systems (i.e. DEV, TEST, etc) to greatly reduce the surface area of risk for data breach in your organization. By eliminating non-production systems as a possible data security risk, you can now concentrate all efforts to protect sensitive and ...

presented by Erik Brandsberg

In this session, we will demonstrate how to implement failover (like PGPool-II) in minutes while adding automated caching for improved performance. Additional topics include monitoring, analyzing query performance, and read/write split to leverage read-only servers. Supported databases include open source Postgres, Greenplum, AWS Aurora for Postgres, and others, without change...

presented by Ivan Novick

Regulations are part of life in financial services organizations. Regulations serve the purpose of ensuring orderly operation of the local and global financial systems. The regulatory burden produces work and activity required by both the regulated and the regulators to comply and measure compliance. Having the right technical and data strategy can make organizations successful in the face of r...

presented by Heikki Heikki Linnakangas

Greenplum is an MPP-database, based on Postgres. It was forked from Postgres almost ten years ago, and was open sourced in 2016. This presentation will give an introduction to the Greenplum architecture and main concepts that have been added to Greenplum to make it MPP-aware.

presented by Jason Yee

At Datadog we handle trillions of points of data per day from the thousands of customers that rely on us to monitor their applications and infrastructure. In this session, I’ll share how we’ve scaled PostgreSQL to not only handle the deluge of data, but how we’ve made our PostgreSQL systems more resilient.

I’ll also discuss which metrics to watch and how troubleshooting based on those metric...

presented by Oskari Saarenmaa

Apache Kafka is a high-performance open-source stream processing platform for collecting and processing large numbers of messages in real-time. It's used in an increasingly large number of data pipelines to handle events such as website click streams, transactions and other telemetry in real-time and at scale.

This session focuses on connecting Kafka and PostgreSQL to automatically update a ...

presented by Michael Meskes

The Elephant Shed is an Open Source PostgreSQL Appliance that bundles and integrates proven components, required for easy management of a PostgreSQL server. Proven tools for all relevant aspects are already preinstalled and preconfigured. The majority of these tools can be controlled via a comfortable web interface. Even experienced PostgreSQL administrators will hardly find an area not covered...

presented by Paul Ramsey

PostGIS adds spatial types to the database, so they can be used “just like any other type”. But unfortunately, spatial types aren’t quite like other types: they’re bigger, they require a lot of complicated algorithms to reason with, and they are built against an implicit model of the world that is generally understood by GIS people but can be a foreign world to database people. This can lead to...

presented by Steve Downs

FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) will discuss how they migrate to Postgres

presented by Michael Freedman

Time-series data is now everywhere -- IoT, user event streams, system monitoring, finance, adtech, industrial control, transportation, and logistics -- and increasingly used to power core applications. It also creates a number of technical challenges: to ingest high volumes of structured data; to ask complex, performant queries for both recent and historical time intervals; to perform specializ...

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

Interact with your fellow attendees while having something to eat.

presented by Jan Wieck

Like any database, PostgreSQL is very dependent on the system's IO. In many situation's a poor performing database is directly related to how PostgreSQL is reading or writing to the disk and using memory. A key factor in improving performance is understanding how PostgreSQL is interacting with these resources.

In this talk I will discuss the interactions between shared buffers, OS buffers, ...

presented by Bruce Momjian

Normal SQL queries return rows where each row is independent of the other returned rows. SQL window functions allow queries to return computed columns based on values in other rows in the result set. This presentation explains the many window function facilities and how they can be used to produce useful SQL query results.

This presentation needs 65 minutes so has to be before lunch, a brea...

presented by Kaarel Moppel

The talk firstly introduces all pertinent levels of database monitoring and then focuses on PostgreSQL and the means it provides. As the Postgres community has already developed a lot of tools in that area, some most popular approaches are explained, together with the problems that different approaches have. To overcome some of these problems a relatively new Open Source tool called "pgwatch2" ...

presented by Howard Goldberg

Greenplum is an open source MPP database optimized for petabyte-sized data stores. Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) is a leading global financial services firm providing investment banking, securities, wealth management and investment management services. This talk will illustrate how Morgan Stanley has utilized Greenplum for various use cases and the lessons learned in managing an ever increasing pro...

presented by Shaun Litt

Conversant is the industry's most powerful personalized digital media company. Conversant processes billions of requests each and every day on behalf of our advertisers. In this session, we will cover how we handle these volumes and some of our analytical solutions on Greenplum Database to support our business insights and customer analytics products.

In order for marketing to work effective...

presented by Christopher Travers

In the last six months I have been working as a database administrator in a 400TB analytics environment built entirely on stock PostgreSQL with local enhancements. Come and listen to the problems we have encountered, problems we are still solving, and solutions we use to deliver analytics at this scale.

Topics will include how and why we use C-language extensions, scaling challenges, and mo...

presented by Arjun Narayan

Industry standard benchmarks are a critical part of measuring any database’s progress, and the next generation of cloud-native databases are no exception. NoSQL (YCSB), OLTP (TPC-C) and OLAP (TPC-H) benchmarks can be useful in testing incremental layers, but they don’t provide a complete picture of the operational complexity of running a globally distributed database cluster.

In this talk ...

presented by Andreas Scherbaum

Ever wondered what might be the best data type for a certain use case? Is it better to use INTEGER or BIGINT, and should you use TIMESTAMP or is it better to use TIMESTAMPTZ? When is the last time you migrated a legacy database and wondered what to use as replacement for VARCHAR2 or CHAR(255)? How to store IP addresses or geographical data, does that fit into VARCHAR or is there something more ...

presented by JP Phillips

Kubernetes has grown to handle all kinds of workloads. The ability to easily deploy a stateful system has never been easier, but the question that remains is, just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it. We'll explore the myriads of ways people are deploying PostgreSQL on Kubernetes and then look beyond the system post-provision. What are the things you must have to effect...

presented by Jacque Istok, Stephen O'Grady, Shaun Litt, and Niels Kasch

Jacque Istok, Head of Data at Pivotal, will moderate a panel discussion with senior data practitioners on massively operationalizing analytics on the Greenplum database.

presented by Joshua D. Drake

One of the most soft after features of Postgres v10 is logical replication. In this presentation we will cover the following topics:

• What is Logical Replication
• How does it work
• Configuring
• Limitations
• Security
• Example Architecture
• Neat Features
• Upcoming features in Postgres v11

presented by George Fraser

Benchmarks are all about making choices: what kind of data will I use? How much? What queries will users run? How you make these choices matter a lot: change your assumptions and the fastest warehouse can become the slowest. 

In this session, we will compare the three major cloud warehousing solutions, Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake and explain the method we used to measure the speed and ...

presented by Pravin Rao and Randy Willard

Join us as we explore similarities and differences between Postgres and Pivotal Greenplum from a DBA’s perspective. This session will cover some of the basics and inner workings of Pivotal Greenplum, a massively parallel processing (MPP) data analytics platform based on the Open Source Greenplum Database project. We will explore MPP concepts, such as data distribution and segmentation, as well ...

presented by Sehrope Sarkuni

PostgreSQL is the most advanced open source database and also one of the most standards compliant. But it also has a number of very useful non-standard features that make impossible things doable and hard things easy.

In this talk we'll go into PostgreSQL-specific features with a focus on real world development and how you can leverage these features in your own applications.

presented by Pilar de Teodoro

When working with databases larger than 10TB that will be heavily read, it is necessary to find different options to improve efficiency, performance and maintainability. In the archives of the European Space Agency, where PostgreSQL is widely used, we have investigated different distributed flavours being postgres-XL the solution that so far is meeting our requirements better. The results of th...

presented by Malcolm McLean

How and why we utilise PostgreSQL, our specific requirements for replication, how we handle it, what alternatives we looked at and what we are investigating for the future.

Our system is a geographically distributed system across multiple countries where data needs to be selectively replicated between each set of servers based on that country's legislation and failover requirements. This pos...

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

Interact with your fellow attendees while having something to eat.

presented by Lloyd Albin

In this presentation we will go over the old school math and the new school PostGIS method of doing the same math for calculating the distance and cost of an aircraft flight. You will notice how much easier it is to use PostGIS.

• Installing PostGIS
  • Cloud Solutions
  • From Source
• Aviation Math
  • Airplane Performance
  • Great Circle Math
• PostGIS Math
  • Updating your table...

presented by Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Moving from Oracle to PostgreSQL has become some sort of national sports. A couple of tools have already been developed to make the move to PostgreSQL easier. However, as none of the tool the tools really satisfied and therefore we came up with ora_migration, a tool, which allows to migrate data and other stuff to PostgreSQL fast and easily.

presented by Atsushi Torikoshi

We, at NTT OSS Center, provide NTT group companies with technical support service for open source software. During our experience of over 10 years providing technical support for PostgreSQL, customers have often demanded measures like replicating partial tables, replication between different major version PostgreSQL and even online major version upgrade. Now we have a way to realize these dem...

presented by Bharath Sitaraman and Frank McQuillan

Advanced analytics and machine learning are rapidly growing in importance in enterprise computing. Key enterprise data typically resides in relational and document form, and it is inefficient to copy data between systems to perform different types of analytical operations.

In addition to leveraging the rich set of Postgres capabilities like window functions, Greenplum offers machine learning...

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

Interact with your fellow attendees while having something to eat.

presented by Mason Sharp

Postgres-XL can be used as a PostgreSQL-based shared-nothing database cluster. In this talk, we discuss extending the Foreign Data Wrapper capability to process external data in parallel using Postgres-XL. Foreign Data Wrappers and extensions used as examples include cstore_fdw (columnar compressed storage), file_fdw (CSVs), timescaledb, and a new dist_fs_fdw that allows use of Alluxio, HDFS an...

presented by Dave Nielsen

When your web application suddenly explodes with 1000's of new users or your microservices need a boost, there is no easier way to increase throughput and reduce latency than with Redis in the cloud. These are just some of the reasons Redis has become one of the fastest growing databases and the most popular database deployed in containers. In this talk, Dave Nielsen, Head of Ecosystem at Redis...

presented by Andrew Dunstan

This talk will focus on the various ways that individuals can contribute to the survival and development of PostgreSQL. This can include provision of time, resources and money in a variety of ways. Sometimes the community can be a little difficult for newcomers to get to grips with. We will discuss how people in different roles, including developers, translators, documenters, and testers c...

presented by Marco Slot

Citus is a sharding extension for postgres that can efficiently distribute a wide range of SQL queries. It uses postgres' planner hook to transparently intercept and plan queries on "distributed" tables. Citus then executes the queries in parallel across many servers, in a way that delegates most of the heavy lifting back to postgres.

Within Citus, we distinguish between several types of SQL...

presented by Thomas Limoncelli

Tom Limoncelli highlights some of the most radical advice from his book “The Practice of Cloud System Administration”. Topics include: create resiliency in software, do risky procedures often, and create a blameless culture to encourage communication and improve system reliability.

presented by Jignesh Shah

In this session we will deep dive into the exciting features of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, including new versions of PostgreSQL releases, new extensions, larger instances. We will also show benchmarks of new RDS instance types, and their value proposition. We will also look at how high availability and read scaling works on RDS PostgreSQL. We will also explore lessons we have learned managing a...

presented by Goutam Tadi

Kubernetes provides a new way to deploy and run software in containers with flexible Services and global DNS discovery. This session will describe the new deployment of Greenplum on the Pivotal Container Service (PKS - the K is for Kubernetes), which provides a Kubernetes environment running on an enterprise-grade infrastructure powered by the BOSH open source project.

Container environments...

presented by John Ashmead

This talk is for people relatively new to PostgreSQL who are wondering:

>How do I get going with PostgreSQL -- in a way that won’t create problems later on!

We’ll go over best practice in:

1. Table design
2. Indexing
3. PostgreSQL types
4. Stored procedures -- when & how to use, when not
5. Triggers
6. How to work with a web framework (i.e. Ruby-on-Rails): what works belongs in t...

presented by Jonathan Katz

Often in applications, it is necessary to be aware of all changes to your database in order to take additional actions. Prior to PostgreSQL 9.4, this could be accomplished with database-level triggers or hooks in your application code, but these methods have both performance and data consistency tradeoffs.

In version 9.4, PostgreSQL introduced logical decoding, which provides an interface to...

presented by Jim Nasby

The use of Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) is perhaps one of the most powerful features PostgreSQL has to offer, but it can be a source of confusion for new and experienced users alike. In this talk we will provide an in-depth walkthrough of why Postgres needs to vacuum and what vacuum does.

Topics:

• MVCC details
• HOT overview
• Identifying tuples to be vacuumed/frozen
• Vis...

presented by Alexander Kukushkin

At a blistering pace and for a variety of reasons, companies are migrating their on-premise database infrastructures to cloud-based solutions - to save costs on hardware, tame the impact of disaster recovery, or even to improve security. Zalando is not an exception: more than two years ago we migrated our first production services to AWS.

In addition to the fully managed database services li...

presented by Peter Eisentraut

This talk will present the PostgreSQL replication solutions pglogical 3 and BDR 3.

pglogical is a PostgreSQL extension for logical replication between two nodes. Most of the code for built-in logical replication in PostgreSQL 10 was derived from pglogical, while pglogical offers a larger feature set, such as row and column filtering, conflict resolution, and compatibility back to PostgreSQL...

presented by Les McMonagle

This session will provide a deep dive into the difference between data protection and data access control, how they can work together in a layered approach to data security and when you need more of one versus the other. The information provided will be applicable to GDPR compliance, HIPAA, HITECH, Omnibus Rule compliance or the hosting and processing of any sensitive or regulated data includi...

presented by PostgresConf Organizers

Interact with your fellow attendees while having something to eat.

presented by Baron Schwartz

Do you know what database indexes are and how they work? Do they seem hard to understand? They don't have to be. The basic principles you need to know are simple and easy to remember. And developers need to know the basics of indexing: your DBAs can't save you, because discovering you need an index after you deploy a feature is often too little, too late. This talk will give you the fundamental...

presented by Dmitry Dolgov

Everyone already knows the Jsonb data type: one of PostgreSQL’s most attractive features which allows efficient work with semi-structured data without sacrificing strong consistency and ability to use all the power of proven relational technology. But what exactly is inside Jsonb, are there any caveats, and how can you accidentally bring down performance?

We will discuss all that questio...

presented by Corey Huinker

Materialized Views are an important tool for capturing complex query information in a way that can save time for subsequent queries. However, materialized views have important limitations in terms of maintenance and updatability. This presentation shows current workarounds for those issues and presents a path forward toward implementing continuously updating materialized views in native postgre...

presented by Sunil Kamath

Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a fully managed enterprise-ready community PostgreSQL. This service is built for developers using the community PostgreSQL database technology you love without the management and administration burden. In this session, we will walk you through the service capabilities such as high availability, security, and elastic scaling of performance, and how the service in...

presented by Hannu Valtonen

Now that you've stored your data in the database you're done with it, right? No.

Typically storing data into your database is only the beginning of its journey through your company's systems.

There's often a need to act on the data: from providing the service the customer actually wanted to sending emails to doing complex data analytics. PostgreSQL's logical replication features have mad...