Bio

I'm a holistic system software engineer, PostgreSQL consultant and trainer, free software activist, and headbanger. I have been working with PostgreSQL since version 9.1. First, as part of my job related to other projects, and now with full dedication since I joined 2ndQuadrant in 2017, which is now part of EDB. I have a background as teaching-assistant and researcher on self-managing distributed systems, and I have presented in different conferences. In open source, I have contributed to the Mozart-Oz programming language and Alfresco communities. In 2018 I have started the PostgreSQL User Group in Belgium.

Talk Description: The pg_catalog was always there, use it!

PostgreSQL users want to know how the system is performing. This is valid for DBAs, system administrators, and developers. They want to know if the system needs some improvements, but also to generate the occasional report requested by managers. Standard monitoring tools will monitor the CPU, RAM and I/O consumption, but they won't be able to tell you if indexes are being used, if tables are bloated, what is the lag of replication, what are the status of sessions connected, and many other interesting and useful things from PostgreSQL.

This talk is intended to review the possibilities offered by the PostgreSQL catalog. Plenty of information is available there but it is unknown to many users, and therefore unused. We will see how to exploit the catalog, how to send the information to other monitoring tools, and how the tables in pg_catalog are fundamentally interconnected to other topics such as performance, replication, MVCC, security, the universe and everything.