PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition: Effective database management for administrators

Over 150 recipes to help you administer your PostgreSQL database more efficiently

About This Book

• Get to grips with the capabilities of PostgreSQL 9.6 to administer your database more efficiently
• Monitor, tune, secure and protect your database
• A step-by-step, recipe-based guide to help you tackle any problem in PostgreSQL administration with ease

Who This Book Is For

This book is for system administrators, database administrators, data architects, developers, and anyone with an interest in planning for, or running, live production databases. This book is most suited to those who have some technical experience.

What You Will Learn

• Implement PostgreSQL features for performance and reliability
• Harness the power of the latest PostgreSQL 9.6 features
• Manage open source PostgreSQL versions 9.5 and 9.6 on various platforms
• Discover advanced technical tips for experienced users
• Explore best practices for planning and designing live databases
• Select and implement robust backup and recovery techniques
• Explore concise and clear guidance on replication and high availability
• See the latest details on Logical Replication and Bi-Directional Replication

In Detail

PostgreSQL is a powerful opensource database management system; now recognized as the expert's choice for a wide range of applications, it has an enviable reputation for performance and stability. PostgreSQL provides an integrated feature set comprising relational database features, object-relational, text search, Geographical Info Systems, analytical tools for big data and JSON/XML document management.

Starting with short and simple recipes, you will soon dive into core features, such as configuration, server control, tables, and data. You will tackle a variety of problems a database administrator usually encounters, from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database, and from using monitoring tools to using storage engines. Recipes based on important topics such as high availability, concurrency, replication, backup and recovery, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting are also given special importance.

By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to run, manage, and maintain PostgreSQL efficiently.

Style and approach

This book takes a step-by-step, recipe-based approach, where each recipe focuses on a particular challenge faced by a PostgreSQL administrator while administering his/her database. Explained in a very easy to follow manner, every task is supported with best practices, tips and tricks.

Simon Riggs is the CTO of 2ndQuadrant and an active PostgreSQL committer. He has contributed to PostgreSQL as a major developer for more than 12 years, having written and designed many new features in every release over that period. His feature credits include replication, performance, business intelligence, management, and security. Under his guidance, 2ndQuadrant is now a leading developer of open source PostgreSQL and a platinum sponsor of the PostgreSQL Project, serving hundreds of clients in USA, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa. Simon is a frequent speaker at many conferences and is well known for his speeches on PostgreSQL Futures and different aspects of replication. He has worked with many different databases as a developer, architect, data analyst, and designer with companies across USA and Europe for nearly 30 years.

Gianni Ciolli is the head of professional services at 2ndQuadrant. He has spoken at PostgreSQL conferences in Europe and abroad, and his other IT skills include functional languages and symbolic computing. Gianni has a PhD in mathematics, and is the author of published research on Algebraic Geometry, Theoretical Physics, and Formal Proof Theory. He previously worked at the University of Florence as a researcher and teacher. Gianni has been working on free and open source software for almost 20 years. From 2001 to 2004, he was a cofounder and the president of PLUG, short for Prato Linux User Group. He organized many sessions of the Italian PostgreSQL conference, and in 2013, he was elected to the board of ITPUG, the Italian PostgreSQL Users Group. He currently lives in London with his son. His other interests include music, drama, poetry, and sport-athletics in particular, where he competes in combined events.

Gabriele Bartolini is a long-time open source programmer, now head of support at 2ndQuadrant, and an active member of the international PostgreSQL community. Gabriele has a degree in statistics from the University of Florence. His areas of expertise are data mining and data warehousing, and he has worked on web traffic analysis in Australia and Italy. He currently lives in Prato, a small but vibrant city located in the northern part of Tuscany, Italy. His second home is Melbourne, Australia, where he studied at Monash University and worked in the ICT sector. Gabriele's hobbies include playing his Fender Stratocaster electric guitar and "calcio" (football or soccer, depending on which part of the world you come from).