Book Image

PostgreSQL 9.6 High Performance

By : Ibrar Ahmed, Gregory Smith
Book Image

PostgreSQL 9.6 High Performance

By: Ibrar Ahmed, Gregory Smith

Overview of this book

<p>Database administrators and developers spend years learning techniques to configure their PostgreSQL database servers for optimal performance, mostly when they encounter performance issues. Scalability and high availability of the database solution is equally important these days. This book will show you how to configure new database installations and optimize existing database server installations using PostgreSQL 9.6.</p> <p>You will start with the basic concepts of database performance, because all successful database applications are destined to eventually run into issues when scaling up their performance. You will not only learn to optimize your database and queries for optimal performance, but also detect the real performance bottlenecks using PostgreSQL tools and some external tools. Next, you will learn how to benchmark your hardware and tune your operating system. Optimize your queries against the database with the help of right indexes, and monitor every layer, ranging from hardware to queries. Moving on, you will see how connection pooling, caching, partitioning, and replication will help you handle increasing database workloads.</p> <p>Achieving high database performance is not easy, but you can learn it by using the right guide—PostgreSQL 9.6 High Performance.</p>
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Sample datasets


In order to show you queries to optimize, you need data. So far, randomly generated data for a small number of tables has been good enough for that, but that has its limits and they were reached in the last chapter.

Obtaining sample data of a significant size for benchmarking purposes is a never ending struggle, because the pace of hardware progress means yesterday's massive test database can be today's trivial workload. A listing that's kept up to date with useful new sources for test databases is at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Sample_Databases and some of these are part of a PostgreSQL sample database project, which has several examples worth checking out.

Pagila

The Pagila database is a particularly interesting sample because it showcases many advanced PostgreSQL features. It relies heavily on stored procedures and even partitions some of its data. The main reason it's not used for examples here is because it's very small, only a few megabytes in size. The non-free license...