Bio

Ilya Kosmodemiansky is a CEO and co-founder at Data Egret. A consultancy specializing in PostgreSQL migration, maintenance and support. Ilya has a broad experience working with PostgreSQL as consultant, architect and administrator. His main focus is database performance and optimization. He sees the mission of PostgreSQL in substituting the commercial databases in high-performance mission-critical applications. His interests are promoting PostgreSQL as enterprise-ready database, distributed transaction processing, data integration.

Talk Description: The "default" postgresql.conf, step by step

If you ever wanted to find out what can be configured in postgresql.conf, you can easily find it in the official Postgres documentation. So, all you need to do is read it, yes, all of it, and you will have a perfectly configured database. Sounds easy, right?

The reality, however, tends to differ from the laboratory conditions that documentation describes, in addition, there is never enough time to go through the documentation, especially, considering that not every parameter would make sense for your database. There are also settled differences that one should be aware of and the new releases that require constant adaptation of your config settings.

In this talk, I will take you through all the settings that, in my experience, as a consultant working with a variety of databases, should be adjusted. I will look into reasoning for it, and review the chain reaction that each change in each of these settings, will trigger. We will review some typical workloads and I will also be sharing some recommended configurations which our DBAs follow when setting up for our clients and which have been proven over and over with different databases and under variety of our client’s requirements.

Following this talk you will have the knowledge required to understand major postgresql.conf parameters, know what role they play in the overall database performance and will be able to set up your own version that will work for your database.

If you are a DBA who is just starting to work with Postgres and would like to make sure that you have a reliable base to build your work on, this talk is for you.