PG BootCamp 2024 Minsk — the first event of the Russian Postgres community in Belarus
During practical conference, participants attended talks from leading experts, mastering the intricacies of working with PostgreSQL DBMS and deepening their knowledge.
PG BootCamp 2024 Minsk, an official event of PostgreSQL global community was held on April 16 in Minsk. During the event, participants gained deeper understanding of PostgreSQL DBMS and learned about its intricacies by attending lectures and participating in hands-on workshops provided by esteemed specialists.
The mission of PG BootCamp initiative is to bring PostgreSQL specialists and enthusiasts together to help sharpen their practical skills and further develop the local PostgreSQL community. The practical conference was an official PostgreSQL community event, held in hybrid format upon strict compliance with PostgreSQL recommendations and Code of Conduct, gathering a total of 1649 participants — 183 guests who attended the conference in person, and 1446 viewers of the online broadcast. Representatives of Tantor Labs (part of the Astra Group), specializing in the design and development of Tantor DBMS and Tantor platform — a tool for managing and monitoring Postgres databases, — as well as PostgreSQL experts from Yandex Cloud and other companies, took part in the PG BootCamp 2024 Minsk. Each participant received a certificate proving their commitment to advancing the PostgreSQL community and learning new knowledge.
Mikhail Goldberg, member of the PostgreSQL Code of Conduct committee, Chair, member of the PG BootCamp initiative group, organizer of the PGDay Israel conferences, opened the event:
"We have been holding PGDay since 2016, and our conferences were directly dedicated to community development. Bruce Momjian and I concluded last year that the public conferences we offer are lacking in something fundamental. We would want to see more practical aspects presented at our events rather than simply theoretical ones," Goldberg noted.
Vadim Yatsenko, CEO of Tantor Labs, a member of the PG BootCamp initiative group, who also delivered a welcoming speech, agrees with him.
"Despite the fact that we all work in different domains, we primarily focus on the fact that we use the open-source PostgreSQL. That’s a huge joint effort of many people around the world. And our community should evolve. If you look at the trends of the last 5-7 years, the popularity of PostgreSQL is only growing. There are so many online participants at today's PG Bootcamp Minsk event, that we will definitely work on further organization of similar events both in Belarus and in Russia," said Yatsenko in conclusion.
One of the key speakers at the event was a member of the PostgreSQL Code of Conduct committee, founder of Stormatics Umair Shahid. At the PG BootCamp 2024 conference in Minsk, he shared his experience in improving PostgreSQL performance and introduced developers to the nuances of designing and scaling applications using PostgreSQL.
"According to DBMS adoption rate trackings, the popularity of PostgreSQL is steadily growing over the past five years. In 2023, it has overtaken MySQL. Today, it is the most popular DBMS among application developers, and the market in this area has exceeded 100 billion dollars. At the same time, 98% of the growth is directly attributed to the cloud segment. The use of Postgres expands very quickly, and transitioning to the cloud further accelerates this process," the speaker noted.
Developers were fascinated by a lecture on designing and scaling applications while using optimized PostgreSQL queries, as well as performance-enhancing functions, architectural improvements, and tuning resource allocation parameters and determining resource utilization considering hardware specifics and type of workload (highlighting the areas to use the AI tools).
During the event, the speakers brought up the most significant challenges associated with database operations. The benefits and complexities of using the Postgres Protocol for client-server communication were described by Andrey Borodin, PostgreSQL сontributor and head of open-source DBMS development unit at Yandex Cloud.
Participants got plenty of practical tips on preventing overflows in integer types in a lecture delivered by PGMechanix lead DBA, Alexander Nikitin.
Fixing of persistent bugs was demonstrated based on plv8 example during the talk of Dmitry Dorofeev, chief architect of Luxms Group of Companies.
Also, the specifics of wait events monitoring and dealing with low-level PostgreSQL performance issues were highlighted by Maxim Milutin, PostgreSQL and openGauss contributor.
DevOps leader at Tantor Labs, Vladimir Vinogradov, demonstrated the path from replica to high-availability PostgreSQL cluster, starting with the basics and explaining the differences between asynchronous and synchronous replication: the first mode captures changes on the master directly during data transmission to the replica, while in synchronous replication the master only commits a transaction after receiving a response from the replica that all transactions are committed.
Lev Nikolaev, developer at Tantor Labs, thoroughly analyzed step-by-step debugging of PostgreSQL source code with Visual Studio Code debugging tool using pg_store_plans as an example.
The PG BootCamp 2024 Minsk was concluded by Vadim Yatsenko, the CEO of Tantor Labs, and Ilya Evdokimov, senior developer at Tantor Labs, with a presentation on debugging stream replication in PostgreSQL. Vadim Yatsenko wrapped up the theoretical part and demonstrated the stream replication scheme in PostgreSQL. Ilya Evdokimov’s talk has zeroed in the practical aspects of the replication process: use of tools, writing tests, and the presentation concluded with a master class on creating and running a test.
After the event, the guests had a chance to continue networking in an informal setting, exchanging business contacts, and sharing experiences with colleagues and industry experts.