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)

Maintaining indexes

Indexes can become a problem in many database applications that involve a high proportion of INSERT/DELETE commands. Just as tables can become bloated, so can indexes.

In the previous recipe, you saw that non-HOT updates can cause bloated indexes.
Non-primary-key indexes are also prone to some bloat from normal INSERT commands, as is common in most relational databases.

Autovacuum does not detect bloated indexes, nor does it do anything to rebuild indexes. So we need to look at other ways to maintain indexes.

Getting ready

PostgreSQL supports commands that will rebuild indexes for you. The client utility, reindexdb, allows you to execute the REINDEX command in a convenient way from the operating system...