Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful opensource database management system; now recognized as the expert's choice for a wide range of applications, it has an enviable reputation for performance and stability. PostgreSQL provides an integrated feature set comprising relational database features, object-relational, text search, Geographical Info Systems, analytical tools for big data and JSON/XML document management. Starting with short and simple recipes, you will soon dive into core features, such as configuration, server control, tables, and data. You will tackle a variety of problems a database administrator usually encounters, from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database, and from using monitoring tools to using storage engines. Recipes based on important topics such as high availability, concurrency, replication, backup and recovery, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting are also given special importance. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to run, manage, and maintain PostgreSQL efficiently.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Finding slow SQL statements

There are two main kinds of slowness that can manifest themselves in a database.

The first kind is a single query that can be too slow to be really usable, such as a customer information query in a CRM running for minutes, a password check query running in tens of seconds, or a daily data aggregation query running for more than a day. These can be found by logging queries that take over a certain amount of time, either at the client end or in the database.

The second kind is a query that is run frequently (say a few thousand times a second) and used to run in single-digit milliseconds, but is now running in several tens or even hundreds of milliseconds, thus slowing down the system. This kind of slowness is much harder to find.

Here, we will show you several ways to find the statements that are either slow or cause the database as a whole to slow down...