Interview with Percona

Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PGConf.EU 2023 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.

What feature in the last PostgreSQL version benefits your company most?

The functionality that data can be filtered based on origin during a replication really helps us a lot. Logical replication improved further over the last releases, but in the past, it was hard to set up the replication because this could lead to an infinite loop. By adding the functionality to filter the data based on origin, we can now set up logical replication by just using PostgreSQL. Those improvements get us closer and closer to a fully implemented and functional logical or bi-directional replication that so far has been available only with extensions or from proprietary solutions.

Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?

Short answer: pg_stat_monitor (PGSM). Not to sound too self-centered, but we created this extension to address a gap we needed and that our customers asked for to help out in the day-to-day business. As a company providing support, managed services, and consulting we cannot emphasise enough the importance of a reliable and in-detail query performance analysis. Having an extension that gives you query performance monitoring with a more holistic view and insights is a game changer in finding your slow queries or understanding your overall setup better. The extension can be used alone or with any other presentation tool like Grafana, but in our opinion, it’s best with our open-source monitoring solution Percona Management and Monitoring and gives you a holistic view in a tool providing centralized monitoring.

Which feature is missing in PostgreSQL?

Data at REST Encryption is a database security feature that automatically encrypts data at rest within a database, making it more difficult for unauthorized users to access or steal data stored on disk. TDE is a well-established feature in many relational databases but never made it into PostgreSQL. Percona came up with a novel idea and is currently working on PG-TDE. This PostgreSQL extension gives you an encrypted access method for PostgreSQL 16 and beyond without needing a customer PostgreSQL build. Check it out and give us your feedback: https://github.com/Percona-Lab/postgres-tde-ext