Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. The book starts with the introduction of relational databases with PostegreSQL. It then moves on to covering data definition language (DDL) with emphasis on PostgreSQL and common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You will then learn the data manipulation language (DML), and advanced topics like locking and multi version concurrency control (MVCC). This will give you a very robust background to tune and troubleshoot your application. The book then covers the implementation of data models in the database such as creating tables, setting up integrity constraints, building indexes, defining views and other schema objects. Next, it will give you an overview about the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL along with Hstore, XML, Json and arrays. Finally by the end of the book, you'll learn to use the JDBC driver and manipulate data objects in the Hibernate framework.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning PostgreSQL
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

PostgreSQL configuration tuning


PostgreSQL's default configuration values are not suitable for the production environment; several default values are often undersized.

Tip

In developing PostgreSQL applications, it is a good idea to have a test system that is configured very closely to a production environment to get accurate performance measures.

In any PostgreSQL environment, the following configuration should be reviewed.

Maximum number of connections

The maximum number of connections is an important parameter in configuring a database. Each client connection consumes memory, thus affecting also the total amount of memory that can be allocated for other purposes. The max_connections configuration parameter's default value is 100; lowering this value allows the database administrator to increase the work_mem setting.

In general, it is good practice to use connection pooling software to reduce the amount of used memory and increase performance, as killing and establishing a connection wastes time...