Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I'm Postgres DBA at parcIT since June 2016 with about 10 years of experience in Postgres.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

Yes to both. I talked about another migration project on the conference in Dublin and am a regular attendee for some years.

What will your talk be about, exactly?

I'll talk about the reasons, why Postgres was chosen for a (estimated) 20TB database and the pitfalls that were hit during implementation. When i joined the team, they had several database crashes and system freezes per week.

I have never seen a Postgres database before, that was unstable and very surprised. People were in doubt, if Postgres is able to handle a few terabytes and were already considering a migration to a proprietary system. Finally, there were only a few more or less easy to avoid causes and after they were fixed, our downtimes are limited to upgrades every other month.

I'm going to introduce the hardware setup with 25TB of NVME storage and how we do backups even during high Write-Ahead Logging traffic. If we get a 70TB SAN online in time, i'll cover that as well. I'm going to show the most effective performance tuning settings that we did and last but not least, what we better had not neglected. We currently pay a multiple of hours to adjust the roles and permissions management afterwords.

Why this topic?

I'd like to show, how we successfully handle terabytes of data and resolve doubts, that Postgres might not be capable to do so.

What is the audience for your talk?

Beginners and Intermediates with interests in databases with high demands on read and write load. Decision-makers with doubts, if Postgres can compete proprietary database systems.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

There is no knowledge required.