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)

Incremental/differential backup and restore

If you have performance problems with a backup of a large PostgreSQL database, then you may consider incremental or differential backups.

An incremental backup is a backup of all files that have changed since the last full backup.
In order to perform a restore, you must restore the full backup and then each set of incremental changes.

A differential backup is a backup of all individual changes since the last full backup. Again, restore requires you to restore the full backup and then apply any changes since then.

How to do it...

To perform a differential physical backup, you can use rsync to compare the existing files against the previous full backup, and then overwrite only the...