Designing for Document Databases in PostgreSQL | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025

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Video of a conference talk exploring the numerous advantages document databases have for developers due to their flexibility and ease of use. PostgreSQL is one of the most versatile general-purpose databases with a huge ecosystem and flexibility built-in. Designing document databases goes beyond schema freedom and data type flexibility; it requires considering changes in all layers of the database stack, including query planning, database state, indexes, cursors, and transaction management.

This talk discusses the architectural design choices we took in developing DocumentDB on top of PostgreSQL:

• How we leveraged PostgreSQL’s extensibility to build as an extension on PostgreSQL

• How we designed database state management and indexes for documents

• What we’re thinking going ahead in terms of leveraging more of PostgreSQL to improve performance of document databases.

Vinod Sridharan is a Partner Software Engineering Architect at Microsoft responsible for the Azure Cosmos DB. He drives low latency, high availability, and performance throughout the Azure Cosmos DB service.

► Video bookmarks:

00:00 Introduction
01:28 What are Document DBs
04:45 Building Queries
08:57 Indexing & Query
14:05 Expressing Filters
22:00 Removing Redundant Clauses
24:32 Performance (JSONB vs BSON)

Everything you need to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 can be found at: https://posetteconf.com

Learn more:
Watch more POSETTE talks: https://aka.ms/posette-playlist

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