PGCon2018 - 2.5

PGCon 2018
The PostgreSQL Conference

Speakers
Ozgun Erdogan
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 1: Thursday - 2018-05-31
Room DMS 1110
Start time 14:15
Duration 00:45
Info
ID 1195
Language used for presentation English

How PostgreSQL Extension APIs are Changing the Face of Relational Databases

PostgreSQL is becoming the relational database of choice. An important factor in the rising popularity of Postgres is the extension APIs that allow developers to improve any database module’s behavior. As a result, Postgres users have access to hundreds of extensions today.

In this talk, we're going to first describe extension APIs. Then, we’re going to present four popular Postgres extensions, and demo their use.

  • PostGIS turns Postgres into a spatial database through adding support for geographic objects.
  • HLL & TopN add approximation algorithms to Postgres. These algorithms are used when real-time responses matter more than exact results.
  • pg_partman makes managing partitions in Postgres easy. Through partitions, Postgres provide 5-10x higher performance for time-series data.
  • Citus transforms Postgres into a distributed database. To do this, Citus shards data, performs distributed deadlock detection, and parallelizes queries.

Finally, we’ll conclude with why we think Postgres sets the way forward for relational databases.

PostgreSQL is becoming the relational database of choice. One important factor in the rising popularity of Postgres are the extension APIs. These APIs allow developers to extend any database sub-module’s behavior for higher performance, security, or new functionality. As a result, Postgres users have access to over a hundred extensions today, and more to come in the future.

In this talk, I’m going to first describe PostgreSQL’s extension APIs. These APIs are unique to Postgres, and have the potential to change the database landscape. Then, we’re going to present the four most popular Postgres extensions, show the use cases where they are applicable, and demo their usage.

  • PostGIS turns Postgres into a spatial database. It adds support for geographic objects, allowing location queries to be run in SQL.
  • HyperLogLog (HLL) & TopN add approximation algorithms to Postgres. These sketch algorithms are used in distributed systems when real-time responses to queries matter more than exact results.
  • pgpartman makes creating and managing partitions in Postgres easy. Through careful partition management with pgpartman, Postgres offers 5-10x higher write and query performance for time-series data.
  • Citus transforms Postgres into a distributed database. Citus transparently shards and replicates data, performs distributed deadlock detection, and parallelizes queries.

After demoing these popular extensions, we’ll conclude with why we think the monolithic relational database is dying and how Postgres sets a path for the future. We’ll end the talk with a Q&A.