PostgreSQL 18 Cookbook, Third Edition: Upgrade to PostgreSQL 18 with ready troubleshooting across replication, partitioning, security, cloud provisioning, backup, and migration

This thoroughly revised 3rd edition troubleshoots through real failure modes, diagnostic techniques, and remediation patterns drawn from years of operating PostgreSQL at scale. In this cookbook, you install PostgreSQL 18, create and design schemas, configure clusters to automatically switch over in case something goes wrong, keep your connections secure using OAuth 2.0, and perform PITR to get your data back exactly how you left it. All the recipes work with a single growing sample database, so each one is clearly connected to the next one, just like how production systems actually develop.

This edition gives you all the tips and tricks of the latest PostgreSQL 18 features, like asynchronous I/O with io_uring, virtual generated columns, temporal constraints, time-ordered UUIDv7() identifiers, OLD and NEW values in RETURNING clauses, logical replication slot synchronization for failover, native OAuth authentication, parallel pg_upgrade with statistics preservation, eager vacuum freezing, and B-tree skip scan lookups. You'll find concrete, tested solutions for things like troubleshooting replication lag, recovering corrupted tables, debugging autovacuum bottlenecks, or migrating away from MD5 authentication. And you'll have the operational confidence to apply them under pressure.

Key Learnings

• Install, configure, and tune PostgreSQL 18 across binary and source code paths
• Diagnose startup failures, replication lag, and autovacuum bottlenecks using built-in views
• Apply new asynchronous I/O subsystem to accelerate scans and vacuum
• Design temporal constraints and virtual generated columns for modern data models
• Configure logical replication slot sync for transparent publisher failover
• Implement OAuth 2.0 authentication and migrate away from deprecated MD5 passwords
• Execute ‘pg_upgrade’ with statistics preservation and parallel compatibility checks
• Build partitioned, sharded schemas using declarative partitioning and Citus
• Perform point-in-time recovery and selective table or schema restoration confidently
• Audit every change with OLD/NEW RETURNING and uuidv7-keyed event logs

Table of Content

1. Preparing PostgreSQL 18
2. Performing Basic PostgreSQL Operations
3. PostgreSQL Cloud Provisioning
4. Database Migration to Cloud and PostgreSQL
5. WAL, I/O, AutoVacuum and ArchiveLog
6. Partitioning and Sharding Strategies
7. Replication, Scalability and High Availability
8. Blob, JSON Query, RETURNING Clause and Connections
9. Authentication, Audit and Encryption
10. Implementing Database Backup Strategies