Schedule - PGConf.DE 2025
Overcoming the Crisis - Recover Guide of PostgreSQL DBA
Date: 2025-05-09
Time: 09:00–09:45
Room: Ballsaal 3
Level: Beginner
When a critical production database can't service to majority of its users we can call this a "crisis". These problems can show up in different forms like data corruptions, data loss arising from user fault, after change issues (upgrade, patch, migration etc.), hardware problems, load issues and more. It's crucial to follow right direction for the solution when "downtime" starts ticking. While supporting big customer systems for many years, I experienced these "crisis" at first hand and prepared this presentation for PostgreSQL DBAs to get ready for these unwanted but possible cases. This session will cover how to overcome the crisis situations with both technical and non-technical aspects just like behavioral approach, problem solving diplomacy, crisis management rules etc. We will start with example scenarios to understand and accept the risk in every condition. Then, we will cover how to prepare organizationally (preparing crisis management plan and technical procedures, performing periodic test etc.) and technically (best practices for scenarios like database backup/restore/recovery, failover, database upgrade/migration). At the last part there will be golden rules to follow, extracted from tens of real-life lessons learned. People attending this session will enhance their readiness for any possible crisis situations on their database systems. This readiness must include both organizational and technical considerations and both sides will be explained by blending them.