Interview with Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres
Find out more about our sponsor Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2024 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
Fujitsu is a dedicated contributor to the Postgres community and deeply engaged across its ecosystem. Over the past year, Fujtisu has undertaken many significant projects within Logical Replication layer, introducing four key features:
- Enabled synchronization of 'logical replication slots' between primary and replica nodes for seamless failover process.
- Made possible the smooth subscription resumption after node upgrade.
- Enabled publisher node upgrade while safeguarding logical replication slots and subscriber data.
- Enhanced subscriber node performance through parallelizing the apply work for large transactions.
We actively participate in community discussions, providing valuable feedback. We also oversee release management, Commitfest coordination and global conference organization ensuring Postgres's smooth operation & development worldwide. We are proud of our significant contributions to Postgres and our representation on the global stage.
Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
In our project debugging, testing and review processes, we heavily rely on two key tools: pg_walinspect and pageinspect.
pg_walinspect serves as a valuable asset in various project tasks as it offers a range of built-in functions that enable us to inspect the contents of Write-Ahead Logs (WAL), providing invaluable insights and facilitating efficient problem-solving and performance optimization efforts.
Pageinspect module assists us in conducting thorough critical code change reviews and debugging processes. It offers essential functions for inspecting the contents of database pages at a low level.
What is the most annoying PostgreSQL problem, and do you have plans or ideas to fix it?
The absence of DDL replication in PostgreSQL is a significant limitation within logical replication. This gap results in manual intervention being required for DDL changes, leading to a cumbersome and error-prone replication process. Integrating DDL replication functionality would streamline operations by automatically replicating schema changes to subscriber nodes, enhancing efficiency and reducing the risk of human error in system maintenance and management.
To address this problem, our team has worked on designing and implementing the support for logical replication of DDLs. We have successfully developed a PoC patch for the feature, laying the groundwork for its integration into PostgreSQL.
