Small-Dollar Fundraising

Lightning presentation for Boston PostgreSQL Users Group (BPUG)
March 2019

Transcript

1. Small-Dollar Fundraising Braulio Carreno ActBlue Technical Services @bcarreno Boston PostgreSQL Users Group (BPUG) March 2019
2. Who I am • Braulio Carreño • amateur DBA • SQL since college (Ingres) • 10 years Oracle • 7 years PostgreSQL • Senior Software Engineer ActBlue
3. ActBlue • founded 2004 • nonprofit organization • independent from political organizations • fundraising platform for Democratic campaigns and committees and nonprofit organizations • as of today every democratic campaign running for president is relying on ActBlue
5. 2018 election cycle • 41 million contributions • $1.6 billion • 15 thousand unique campaigns, committees, and organizations
6. Lifetime Volume
7. How we use PostgreSQL • everything! • since first version 2004 from Ruby (Rails in 2005) • process donations and disbursements • compliance • tools for campaigns and nonprofit organizations • why? ACID-compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability)
8. Architecture • 380 GB database • hosting with AWS and Rackspace • manage our own PostgreSQL • multiple replicas for performance and redundancy • heavily cached (Fastly) • use Sidekiq for asynchronous processing
9. Challenges • performance • availability • migrating to Amazon Relational DB Service (RDS) • execution plans differ between environments • query planner doesn’t use my index
10. Conclusion • PostgreSQL is a pillar of our system • Thanks to the contributors
11. Join us! ActBlue is always looking for top talent www.actblue.com/jobs or email jobs@actblue.com Braulio Carreno twitter: @bcarreno blog: http://carreno.me thanks!