Digest of the upcoming talks

Let us present you with a digest of the upcoming talks that were announced this week.

"Experience of integrating PostgreSQL into the educational process in the Siberian State Aerospace University"

Where do PostgreSQL specialists come from? They have all studied once at the universities. What kinds of knowledge in PostgreSQL they received? How to prevent all those years spent by a student inside the walls of a university from going amiss when it comes to experience with PostgreSQL? Which role can the professional community play in this?

A student who studies databases in a university begins by writing simple SQL queries. However, he should aim to study and learn how to use advanced (and more exciting) things such as triggers and stored procedures. Traditionally, the "Relational databases" discipline is studied during the third year at the university. Hower, in my educational occupation I prefer to accustom students to databases during their first year in context of ther disciplines such "Programming languages" and "Introduction to software engineering". I always propose usage of PostgreSQL under Linux or FreeBSD instead of MS Access under OS Windows. As for such things as triggers and stored procedures, we study them by implementing mechanisms of storing hierarchical data structures in relational databases.

"Warm standby done right - with 9.5, it's finally possible"

People has been setting up warm standby systems with streaming replication since version 9.0, and even longer with file-based log-shipping. However, there has been a few pitfalls that many people don't know about, while others have simply accepted the risks.

PostgreSQL 9.5 brings a bunch of new features and subtle changes that make warm standby setups more robust than ever. In 9.5, the interaction between a WAL archive and failover has been revised. pg_rewind makes it possible to resynchronize an old master server after failover - even an unplanned one. Replication slots, already introduced in 9.4, make the behavior of a standby falling behind nicer.

This presentation explains the changes, and why they were needed. Finally, I'm going to walk through setting up a simple, robust, two server hot standby system, using only built-in tools and simple shell scripts, taking advantage of the new features.

A TARDIS for your ORM - application level time travel in PostgreSQL

What do you do when your requirements say you need to be able to reproduce the exact same results that a query did sometime in the past? Including to be able to reproduce incorrect statistics on data that has since been corrected? And being able to reproduce exactly which rows were returned by a query in the past?

Well, you do like any time lord would do - break out the TARDIS. Or maybe just use PostgreSQL...

This talk will outline a technique to use some PostgreSQL features, including range types and exclusion constraints/indexes, to trick an ORM application to work with transparent time travel, with the goal of close to zero modifications to the application, while maintaining consistency.