Implementing Strict Serializability with pg_xact | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025

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Video of a conference talk delving into the implementation of strict serializability. The holy grail of database consistency for distributed systems has always been performant Strict Serializability. Because there's no silver bullet for implementing this functionality generically without atomic clocks or other specialized hardware, PostgreSQL has yet to implement this natively. When engineers at authzed were tasked with building a globally consistent authorization system backed by PostgreSQL, we were determined not only to discover a solution to this level of consistency, but ensure it was portable across almost all PostgreSQL environments. This presentation will walk the audience through understanding database consistency, how Postgres implements it, and how we were able to make guarantees of Strict Serializability in our applications by peering into the internals of PostgreSQL with the facilities provided by pg_xact. Jimmy Zelinskie is a software engineer and product leader with the goal of empowering the world through the democratization of software through open source development. He's currently the CPO and cofounder of authzed where he's focused on bringing hyperscaler best-practices in authorization software to the industry at large. At CoreOS, he helped pioneer the cloud-native ecosystem by starting and contributing to many of its foundational open source projects. After being acquired by Red Hat, his focus shifted to the enablement and adoption of cloud-native t

Published 2025-06-12 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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