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

Summary


There are several aspects of tuning the performance of PostgreSQL. These aspects are related to hardware configuration, network settings, and PostgreSQL configuration. PostgreSQL is often shipped with a configuration that is not suitable for production. Due to this, one should at least configure the PostgreSQL buffer setting, RAM settings, number of connections, and logging. Note that several PostgreSQL settings are correlated, such as the RAM settings and number of connections. In addition to this, one should take great care with settings that require a server restart because these are difficult to change in the production environment.

Often, PostgreSQL produces a good execution plan if the physical structure of a database is normalized and the query is written properly. However, this is not always the case. To overcome performance issues, PostgreSQL provides the EXPLAIN utility command, which can be used to generate execution plans. The EXPLAIN command has several options, such...