Date: 2025-04-25
Time: 15:05–15:50
Room: West
Level: Intermediate
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 through 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.