PostgreSQL Internals Uncovered: Enhancing Logical Replication and Introducing Columnar Indexing
Presented by:
Vigneshwaran C
My name is Vigneshwaran C, and I live in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. I work as part of the Postgres open-source team in Fujitsu. I have 19 years overall experience.
- I'm a recognized Postgres Contributor Since 2023.
- I mainly work on developing features in logical replication, basebackup, dump and restore.
- Some of the features developed include upgrade of logical replication cluster, tables in schema publication, skip remote replication origin data, replication slot statistics enhancement, etc.
- Currently I'm working on supporting sequence replication and reviewing the active logical replication defects
- I'm part of the team that organizes the quarterly Postgres Bangalore Meetup to bring the local community together.
- I have given various talks in PGConf India and PGConf Russia.
- In my freetime I pick few patches from commitfest and review them.
I write few blogs on the feature that I have worked:
No video of the event yet, sorry!
This talk will dive into a series of recent contributions to PostgreSQL, made possible by a team working with sustained focus on core database infrastructure. Rather than offering high-level overviews, the session will explore the technical design and implementation details behind several complex features we’ve delivered. These include: Conflict Detection for Update-Deleted Tuples – enhancing logical replication robustness by detecting updates to rows that no longer exist on the subscriber. Logical Replication of Sequences – implementing consistent replication of sequence values to address long-standing gaps in logical replication. Conflict Resolution Mechanisms – designing pluggable strategies for resolving conflicting writes in distributed systems. Vertical Clustered Index (VCI) – building a columnar storage extension optimised for analytical workloads, with parallelised access paths. pg_createsubscriber Enhancements – streamlining replication setup by reducing manual configuration steps. Defect Resolution – addressing bugs and edge cases in logical replication to improve stability and operational predictability. We’ll cover not just what these features do, but how they were implemented, highlighting technical decisions, upstream collaboration, and some of the challenges faced along the way. The session aims to give attendees a closer look at what it takes to deliver meaningful changes to a mature database like PostgreSQL.
- Date:
- 2025 October 17 15:10 +11
- Duration:
- 40 min
- Room:
- Taylor
- Conference:
- PG Down Under 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Development
- Difficulty:
- Medium