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)

Killing a specific session

Sometimes, the only way to let the system continue as a whole is by surgically terminating some offending database sessions. Yes, you read it right: surgically. You might indeed be tempted to reboot the server, but you should think of that as a last resort in a business continuity scenario.

In this recipe, you will learn how to intervene, from gracefully canceling a query to brutally killing the actual process from the command line.

How to do it...

You can either run this function as a superuser or with the same user as that of the offending backend (look for the usename field in the pg_stat_activity view).

Once you have figured out the backend you need to kill, use the function named pg_terminate_backend...