Book description
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.
Table of contents
- Customer Feedback
- Preface
-
First Steps
- Introduction
- Getting PostgreSQL
- Connecting to the PostgreSQL server
- Enabling access for network/remote users
- Using graphical administration tools
- Using the psql query and scripting tool
- Changing your password securely
- Avoiding hardcoding your password
- Using a connection service file
- Troubleshooting a failed connection
-
Exploring the Database
- Introduction
- What version is the server?
- What is the server uptime?
- Locating the database server files
- Locating the database server's message log
- Locating the database's system identifier
- Listing databases on this database server
- How many tables are there in a database?
- How much disk space does a database use?
- How much disk space does a table use?
- Which are my biggest tables?
- How many rows are there in a table?
- Quickly estimating the number of rows in a table
- Listing extensions in this database
- Understanding object dependencies
-
Configuration
- Introduction
- Reading the fine manual
- Planning a new database
- Changing parameters in your programs
- Finding the current configuration settings
- Which parameters are at non-default settings?
- Updating the parameter file
- Setting parameters for particular groups of users
- The basic server configuration checklist
- Adding an external module to PostgreSQL
- Using an installed module
- Managing installed extensions
-
Server Control
- Introduction
- Starting the database server manually
- Stopping the server safely and quickly
- Stopping the server in an emergency
- Reloading the server configuration files
- Restarting the server quickly
- Preventing new connections
- Restricting users to only one session each
- Pushing users off the system
- Deciding on a design for multitenancy
- Using multiple schemas
- Giving users their own private database
- Running multiple servers on one system
- Setting up a connection pool
- Accessing multiple servers using the same host and port
-
Tables and Data
- Introduction
- Choosing good names for database objects
- Handling objects with quoted names
- Enforcing the same name and definition for columns
- Identifying and removing duplicates
- Preventing duplicate rows
- Finding a unique key for a set of data
- Generating test data
- Randomly sampling data
- Loading data from a spreadsheet
- Loading data from flat files
-
Security
- Introduction
- The PostgreSQL superuser
- Revoking user access to a table
- Granting user access to a table
- Granting user access to specific columns
- Granting user access to specific rows
- Creating a new user
- Temporarily preventing a user from connecting
- Removing a user without dropping their data
- Checking whether all users have a secure password
- Giving limited superuser powers to specific users
- Auditing DDL changes
- Auditing data changes
- Always knowing which user is logged in
- Integrating with LDAP
- Connecting using SSL
- Using SSL certificates to authenticate
- Mapping external usernames to database roles
- Encrypting sensitive data
-
Database Administration
- Introduction
- Writing a script that either succeeds entirely or fails entirely
- Writing a psql script that exits on the first error
- Investigating a psql error
- Performing actions on many tables
- Adding/removing columns on a table
- Changing the data type of a column
- Changing the definition of a data type
- Adding/removing schemas
- Moving objects between schemas
- Adding/removing tablespaces
- Moving objects between tablespaces
- Accessing objects in other PostgreSQL databases
- Accessing objects in other foreign databases
- Updatable views
- Using materialized views
-
Monitoring and Diagnosis
- Introduction
- Real-time viewing using pgAdmin
- Checking whether a user is connected
- Checking which queries are running
- Checking which queries are active or blocked
- Knowing who is blocking a query
- Killing a specific session
- Detecting an in-doubt prepared transaction
- Knowing whether anybody is using a specific table
- Knowing when a table was last used
- Usage of disk space by temporary data
- Understanding why queries slow down
- Investigating and reporting a bug
- Producing a daily summary of log file errors
- Analyzing the real-time performance of your queries
-
Regular Maintenance
- Introduction
- Controlling automatic database maintenance
- Avoiding auto-freezing and page corruptions
- Removing issues that cause bloat
- Removing old prepared transactions
- Actions for heavy users of temporary tables
- Identifying and fixing bloated tables and indexes
- Monitoring and tuning vacuum
- Maintaining indexes
- Adding a constraint without checking existing rows
- Finding unused indexes
- Carefully removing unwanted indexes
- Planning maintenance
-
Performance and Concurrency
- Introduction
- Finding slow SQL statements
- Collecting regular statistics from pg_stat* views
- Finding out what makes SQL slow
- Reducing the number of rows returned
- Simplifying complex SQL queries
- Speeding up queries without rewriting them
- Discovering why a query is not using an index
- Forcing a query to use an index
- Using parallel query
- Using optimistic locking
- Reporting performance problems
-
Backup and Recovery
- Introduction
- Understanding and controlling crash recovery
- Planning backups
- Hot logical backups of one database
- Hot logical backups of all databases
- Backups of database object definitions
- Standalone hot physical database backup
- Hot physical backup and continuous archiving
- Recovery of all databases
- Recovery to a point in time
- Recovery of a dropped/damaged table
- Recovery of a dropped/damaged database
- Improving performance of backup/recovery
- Incremental/differential backup and restore
- Hot physical backups with Barman
- Recovery with Barman
-
Replication and Upgrades
- Introduction
- Replication best practices
- Setting up file-based replication - deprecated
- Setting up streaming replication
- Setting up streaming replication security
- Hot Standby and read scalability
- Managing streaming replication
- Using repmgr
- Using replication slots
- Monitoring replication
- Performance and synchronous replication
- Delaying, pausing, and synchronizing replication
- Logical replication
- Bi-directional replication
- Archiving transaction log data
- Upgrading - minor releases
- Major upgrades in-place
- Major upgrades online
Product information
- Title: PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition
- Author(s):
- Release date: April 2017
- Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
- ISBN: 9781785883187
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