PostgreSQL physical replication - internals, latest development and opportunities | POSETTE 2024

Video of a conference talk about PostgreSQL physical replication presented by Krishnakumar R and Melih Mutlu at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024. In this talk you will get to learn about the internals of Physical replication in PostgreSQL. We will start with architectural overview of how physical replication works and go through details of various components involved such as WAL records, WAL receiver, WAL sender etc. Further we dig into details of how the recovery and WAL apply interacts to ensure that standby and read replicas maintains a consistent view. We will also delve into the role buffer pool plays in these interactions and look deeper into features such as hot standby feedback. We will also look at the protocol used in physical replication.

PostgreSQL 16 & 17 has some exciting improvements been made in the physical replication space. This session will go through the overview of those improvements.

Finally, we will conclude the talk with a brief overview of potential improvement opportunities in the physical replication space.

Krishnakumar (KK) started his professional life with porting Linux to embedded boards used in firewalls, electric networks etc. Spanning two decades of industry experience, KK has spent time solving challenges, building products and features in areas such as High-performance computing (HPC), Scalable filesystems and Storage. He came to Microsoft as part of Storsimple (a hybrid cloud storage product) acquisition and stayed around working on intersection of edge and the cloud and spent time in Kubernetes space before moving to Databases. After being part of the journey building a growing PostgreSQL service on Azure he joined as Engineering manager for committers and contributors team focused on open-source PostgreSQL.

Melih is a software Engineer at Microsoft. Working on open source PostgreSQL. Boğaziçi University Alumni. He is based in Istanbul.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro to speaker & topic
02:41 - Replication terminology
10:19 - How does physical replication work?
16:29 - Recent improvements in physical replication
18:38 - Opportunities for future improvements to physical replication

✅ Learn more:

📌 Let’s connect:

#PosetteConf #PostgreSQL #Database

Presenters:
Krishnakumar R, Group Engineering Manager, PostgreSQL engine @ Microsoft
Melih Mutlu, Software Engineer, Microsoft

Connect: