Dude, where's my byte?

This educational, interactive session seeks to lay bare the grand design of storage for PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced open source database. It is common in the industry for folk to get a working understanding of a database, mostly through the low barrier entry ticket of SQL.

This talk aims to empower users and aspiring administrators of the PostgreSQL database by imparting a solid theoretical foundation and helping develop a degree of mechanical empathy for their installations by compressing critical database concepts gleaned over years of software engineering experience, self-reflection and research.

Through the demonstration of the life-cycle of a single byte of data, we will make checkpoints and many teachable concepts including, but not limited to:

• ACID compliance
• Write Ahead Log (WAL)
• File structure including Heap, block & tuple
• Caching
• MVCC
• Transaction Isolation
• Background processes
• Hardware optimizations