Jonathan S. Katz: The journey towards active-active replication in PostgreSQL (PGConf.EU 2023)

Explore the journey to active-active replication in PostgreSQL, discussing conflict detection and resolution, quorum commit, logical replication features, and the community's role in driving development, highlighting trade-offs and use cases.

Key takeaways
  • The journey to active-active replication in PostgreSQL is a big effort that requires multiple components to work together seamlessly.
  • Effective conflict detection and resolution are crucial to ensure data consistency and correctness.
  • Quorum commit provides a good balance between availability and consistency.
  • Logical replication provides advanced features like role-based permissions, subscription management, and conflict resolution.
  • Failover slots simplify the process of promoting a standby to a primary node.
  • Sequence access methods can help improve performance and parallelism in parallel apply of large transactions.
  • The community plays a vital role in driving the development of logical replication features.
  • Replication models like physical and logical replication have different trade-offs and use cases.
  • Building systems for high-availability and scalability requires careful consideration of various factors.
  • Conflict resolution systems are essential to ensure data consistency and correctness in distributed systems.
  • Active-active replication requires careful management and implementation to ensure low-downtime and high-availability.
  • Logical replication can be used in various scenarios, such as real-time data warehousing and financial services systems.
  • Sequence access methods provide a way to add functionality to PostgreSQL.
  • Postgres has makes it easy to create a backup and restore system from a standby instance.
  • There are various ways to resolve conflicts, such as sequence access methods and error codes.
  • The journey to active-active replication is ongoing, with new features and improvements being added regularly.
  • The focus on logical replication has been an effort to support a wide range of use cases and scenarios.
  • The community is actively working on improving the performance of logical replication.