Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By : Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar
Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By: Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. It also provides NoSQL capabilities and very rich data types and extensions. All of this makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in software systems. If you run a database, you want it to perform well and you want to be able to secure it. As the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL has unique built-in ways to achieve these goals. This book will show you a multitude of ways to enhance your database’s performance and give you insights into measuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL database to achieve better performance. This book is your one-stop guide to elevate your PostgreSQL knowledge to the next level. First, you’ll get familiarized with essential developer/administrator concepts such as load balancing, connection pooling, and distributing connections to multiple nodes. Next, you will explore memory optimization techniques before exploring the security controls offered by PostgreSQL. Then, you will move on to the essential database/server monitoring and replication strategies with PostgreSQL. Finally, you will learn about query processing algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Tuning query-related parameters


In this recipe, we will talk about the query planning related parameters and the associated tuning aspects.

How to do it...

The following are the query planning related parameters that usually require tuning:

  • random_page_cost

  • seq_page_cost

  • effective_cache_size

  • work_mem

  • constraint_exclusion

These parameters can be set in the postgresql.conf configuration file.

How it works...

random_page_cost: This parameter is basically used to estimate the cost of a random page fetch in abstract cost units. The default value of this parameter is 4.0. Random page cost is basically used to represent the coefficient between the cost of looking up one row via sequential scans against the cost of looking up a single row individually using random access, that is, disk seeks. This factor influences the query planner's decision to use indexes instead of a table scan while executing queries. Reducing this value relative to the seq_page_cost parameter will cause the system to prefer...