PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance

Chapter 7. Routine Maintenance

PostgreSQL aims to be easy to maintain. But like any database, heavy activity can lead to a drop in performance due to overhead. The approach taken to handle concurrent read and write scalability in the database can leave behind significant amounts of data that needs to be cleaned up properly. Understanding why that happens is valuable for modeling just how often related maintenance needs to occur. Another aspect of maintaining any database server is monitoring how well the queries it runs execute.

Transaction visibility with multiversion concurrency control

One design decision any database needs to make is how to handle the situation where multiple clients might be interacting with the same data. PostgreSQL uses a ...