Managing Postgres at scale: Challenges, Tools & Techniques | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025

Video of a conference talk focused on database management. Managing databases at scale can be hard! Databases keep getting bigger, and organisations are managing more and more databases. To make things even more challenging, you may be one of the many people expected to implement and look after database systems despite not actually being a database administrator. Maybe your training and expertise lies in other areas such as sysadmin, devops or application development. In this session, we’ll think about some of the difficulties you might encounter when managing databases at scale, whether that means looking after multi-terabyte databases or being responsible for hundreds or even thousands of databases. More importantly, we’ll look at the skills, tools and techniques that you can rely on to manage them successfully. This will include topics such as: • architecture • automation • disaster recovery, high availability & backups • sizing, memory and storage • partitioning and sharding options • monitoring and alerting Karen Jex was a database administrator for over 20 years and was once described as “quite personable for a DBA”, which she decided to take as a compliment! She’s now a Senior Solutions Architect, helping her customers to design and manage their (PostgreSQL) database environments. Karen gives talks about databases at PostgreSQL and developer conferences because she loves sharing knowledge. She is also on the PostgreSQL Europe board and leads the recently formed PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Task Force. When she’s not playing with databases, Karen can either be found crocheting cute gifts for her friends, or out on one of her bikes enjoying the mountains where she lives with her family. ► Video bookmarks: ⏩ 00:00 Introduction ⏩ 01:24 Defining “At Scale” ⏩ 03:08 Challenges of Managing Databases at Scale ⏩ 05:46 Database Architecture & Design ⏩ 16:30 Database Monitoring & Alerting ⏩ 19:33 High Availability & Disaster Recover ⏩ 22:42 Op