PGCon2014 - Final Release

PGCon 2014
The PostgreSQL Conference

Speakers
Christophe Pettus
Schedule
Day Talks - Day 1 - Thu May 22 - 2014-05-22
Room Monpetit 202
Start time 13:00
Duration 00:45
Info
ID 644
Event type Lecture
Track DBA
Language used for presentation English

The Worst Day of Your Life

Recovering from Crises and Disasters

What do you do when the worst happens? It could be a catastrophic hardware (or even data center) failure, a badly placed rm -rf *, or a PostgreSQL bug. We'll discuss how to recover from disasters that are far outside the usual operating procedure... and how to avoid getting into them in the first place.

Every DBA with real-life experience knows that sinking feeling when you realize that something terrible has happened: PostgreSQL crashes with a PANIC message, you realize you were on the production system when you dropped that table, or you get a status update that "us-east is currently experiencing problems."

What do you do?

There's no single solution to catastrophic problems, but we can talk about strategies that might help you keep a cool head while everything around you is losing theirs. We'll talk about things like:

  • Dealing with PostgreSQL bugs.
  • Catastrophic hardware failures.
  • Application and operator error.

And, of course, we'll discuss what you need to do in advance to make the Worst Day of Your Life a little bit less traumatic:

  • Backup and recovery strategies and tradeoffs.
  • Upgrade procedures.
  • Planning for business continuity in major disasters.