Goodbye, Maintenance Windows: Achieving Near Zero-Downtime Operations with Postgres 19
Presented by:
Rajni Baliyan
Rajni Baliyan is a Sydney-based Database Support Manager with over 15 years of experience, specializing in PostgreSQL and enterprise database technologies including SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2. At Fujitsu Australia Limited, where she has served for the past 8 years, Rajni leads database operations and support for PostgreSQL and Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres.
She manages cross-functional teams, oversees service delivery, and drives strategic initiatives to ensure database reliability, performance, and customer satisfaction. Her role includes coordinating incident response, implementing best practices for database health, and aligning technical solutions with business objectives.
As the current President of PostgreSQL Down Under (PGDU), Rajni is a passionate advocate for open-source technologies. She has spoken at major PostgreSQL events across Oceania and the Asia-Pacific region, and continues to lead community initiatives that promote innovation, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing.
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Let’s be honest: nobody actually likes a midnight maintenance window. Taking an application offline to reclaim disk space, holding your breath during a sequence cutover on a logical migration, or dealing with flaky schema parsing scripts introduces massive operational stress. For years, the community has relied on complex external workarounds or third-party extensions to bypass these core limitations. With PostgreSQL 19, the engine is growing up. It is absorbing these operational headaches and turning them into native, first-class, non-blocking primitives. This talk is a practical, battle-tested operational guide for DBAs, SREs, and engineering leads who need to maintain continuous database uptime. Through quick, side-by-side structural demos, we will look at the painful "Before" vs. the native "After," diving straight into two core pillars of the Postgres 19 ecosystem: • Native, Non-Blocking Space Reclamation: We’ll contrast the old way of relying on native VACUUM FULL or external extensions like pg_repack against the new in-core REPACK CONCURRENTLY mechanism. You’ll see how the core engine natively handles logical decoding boundaries to clean up tables on high-traffic primaries without blowing out write latency or replication slot lag. • Flawless Logical Failovers: Sequence drift is a historic headache during logical migrations, usually requiring custom, error-prone sync scripts. We will look at how the new logical sequence synchronization workers (REFRESH SEQUENCES) handle this natively to guarantee a clean, conflict-free cutover before you promote a subscriber. Key Takeaways for Attendees: • Master Live Table Rebuilds: Implement native REPACK CONCURRENTLY safely, understanding how to monitor WAL production and manage replication slots under heavy write workloads. • Eliminate Sequence Drift: Step-by-step configuration of sequence synchronization workers to ensure flawless, zero-data-loss logical migration cutovers.
- Date:
- 2026 October 30 16:00 +11
- Duration:
- 40 min
- Room:
- Oxford 1 + 2
- Conference:
- PG Down Under 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Ops and Administration
- Difficulty:
- Medium