Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 9.6

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 9.6

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is an open source database used for handling large datasets (Big Data) and as a JSON document database. It also has applications in the software and web domains. This book will enable you to build better PostgreSQL applications and administer databases more efficiently. We begin by explaining the advanced database design concepts in PostgreSQL 9.6, along with indexing and query optimization. You will also see how to work with event triggers and perform concurrent transactions and table partitioning, along with exploring SQL and server tuning. We will walk you through implementing advanced administrative tasks such as server maintenance and monitoring, replication, recovery and high availability, and much more. You will understand the common and not-so-common troubleshooting problems and how you can overcome them. By the end of this book, you will have an expert-level command of the advanced database functionalities and will be able to implement advanced administrative tasks with PostgreSQL.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
PostgreSQL Overview

Transaction log archiving and recovery

After this brief introduction to the transaction log in general, it is time to focus our attention on the process of transaction log archiving. As you have seen, the transaction log contains a sequence of binary changes made to the storage system. So, why not use it to replicate database instances and do a lot of other cool stuff?

Configuring for archiving

The first thing we want to achieve in this chapter is to create a configuration to perform standard point-in-time-recovery (PITR). There are a couple of advantages of PITR over ordinary dumps:

  • You will lose less data because you can restore a certain point in time and not just to the fixed backup point.
  • Restoring will be faster because indexes don't have to be created...