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)

Recovery with Barman

This recipe assumes that you have read the previous recipe, Hot physical backups with Barman, and successfully installed Barman on the malcolm server, backing up the Postgres databases running on angus and bon. We will use the same nomenclature in the examples in this recipe.

A recovery procedure is a reaction to a failure. In database terms, this could be related to an unintentional human error (for example, a DROP operation on a table), an attack (think of Little Bobby Tables), a hardware failure (for example, a broken hard drive), or (less likely) a natural disaster.

Even though you might be tempted to think that you are immune to disasters or failures (we wish you were), you are advised to perform regular tests and simulations of recovery procedures. If you have a team of engineers, we suggest that you schedule a simulation every six months (at least)...