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)

Understanding and controlling crash recovery

Crash recovery is the PostgreSQL subsystem that saves us, should the server crash or fail as part of a system crash.

It's good to understand a little about it and to do what we can to control it in our favor.

How to do it...

If PostgreSQL crashes, there will be a message in the server log with the severity level set to PANIC. PostgreSQL will immediately restart and attempt to recover using the transaction log or Write-Ahead Log (WAL).

The WAL consists of a series of files written to the pg_xlog subdirectory of the PostgreSQL data directory. Each change made to the database is recorded first in WAL, hence the name write-ahead log, as a synonym of transaction log. When a transaction...