Professional PostgreSQL Scheduling Made Easy

Pavlo Golub

The community has already developed several tools in that area. Some popular options will be highlighted together with the problems that different scheduling approaches have: pgAgent, jpgAgent, pg_cron, etc.

To overcome some of these problems, a new Open Source tool developed by me, called pg_timetable, is introduced and explained in detail.

It offers the simplest possibly entry into exhaustive Postgres scheduling combined with system tasks (cron on steroids). Also will be discussed advanced topics like transaction support, cross-cluster tasks, and cross-platform tasks.

The talk firstly introduces all appropriate levels of database scheduling regardless of the vendor: built-in, system schedulers, and then focuses on PostgreSQL.

Then we will throw some light onto the meaning and importance of critical tasks: SQL (database) level, system level, predefined tasks (depending on a scheduler)

I will describe different conceptions of scheduled tasks:
* usual cron syntax, e.g., “At 00:05 in Aug” [5 0 * 8 *]
* non-standard by event, e.g., system reboot [@reboot]
* interval syntax, e.g. [@every 1h 15m], [@after 0h 15m]
* signaled tasks, started by a user or a monitoring system.