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)

Planning backups

This recipe is all about thinking ahead and planning. If you're reading this recipe before you take a backup, well done!

The key thing to understand is that you should plan your recovery, not your backup. The type of backup you take influences the type of recovery that is possible, so you must give some thought to what you are trying to achieve beforehand.

If you want to plan your recovery, then you need to consider the different types of failure that can occur. What type of recovery do you wish to perform?

You need to consider the following main aspects:

  • Full or partial database?
  • Everything or just object definitions?
  • Point-in-time recovery (PITR)
  • Restore performance

We need to look at the characteristics of the utilities to understand what our backup and recovery options are. It's often beneficial to have multiple types of backup to cover the different...