Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL 11 - Third Edition

By : Salahaldin Juba, Andrey Volkov
Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL 11 - Third Edition

By: Salahaldin Juba, Andrey Volkov

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open source database management systems in the world, and it supports advanced features included in SQL standards. This book will familiarize you with the latest features in PostgreSQL 11, and get you up and running with building efficient PostgreSQL database solutions from scratch. Learning PostgreSQL, 11 begins by covering the concepts of relational databases and their core principles. You’ll explore the Data Definition Language (DDL) and commonly used DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You’ll also learn how to create tables, define integrity constraints, build indexes, and set up views and other schema objects. As you advance, you’ll come to understand Data Manipulation Language (DML) and server-side programming capabilities using PL/pgSQL, giving you a robust background to develop, tune, test, and troubleshoot your database application. The book will guide you in exploring NoSQL capabilities and connecting to your database to manipulate data objects. You’ll get to grips with using data warehousing in analytical solutions and reports, and scaling the database for high availability and performance. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a thorough understanding of PostgreSQL 11 and developed the necessary skills to build efficient database solutions.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Tuning performance for write

High write loads can have different patterns. For example, this can be a result of writing events to PostgreSQL or it can be a result of a bulk load from a database dump or an ETL job. You can tune PostgreSQL for high write loads by doing the following:

  • Hardware configuration:
    • You should use RAID 1+0 instead of RAID 5 or 6. RAID 10 has a much better performance for heavy writes. Also, it's better to store transaction logs (pg_xlog) on a separate hard disk.
    • You can use SSD hard disks with write-back cache (WBC), which significantly increases write performance. Also make sure your SSDs can persist cached data on power failure.
  • PostgreSQL server setting:
    • fsync: By default, fsync is on. This parameter makes sure that the database can be recovered in the event of a hardware crash. fsync makes sure that the data is actually written on the hard...