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)

Identifying and fixing bloated tables and indexes

PostgreSQL implements Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC), which allows users to read data at the same time as writers make changes. This is an important feature for concurrency in database applications, as it can allow the following:

  • Better performance because of fewer locks
  • Greatly reduced deadlocking
  • Simplified application design and management

MVCC is a core part of PostgreSQL and cannot be turned off; nor would you really want it to be. The internals of MVCC have some implications for the DBA that need to be understood: each row represents a row version, and therefore it has two system columns, xmin and xmax, indicating the identifiers of the two transactions when the version was created and deleted, respectively. The value of xmax is NULL if that version has not been deleted yet.

The general idea is that, instead of...