Book Image

PostgreSQL High Availability Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Shaun Thomas
Book Image

PostgreSQL High Availability Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Shaun Thomas

Overview of this book

Databases are nothing without the data they store. In the event of a failure - catastrophic or otherwise - immediate recovery is essential. By carefully combining multiple servers, it’s even possible to hide the fact a failure occurred at all. From hardware selection to software stacks and horizontal scalability, this book will help you build a versatile PostgreSQL cluster that will survive crashes, resist data corruption, and grow smoothly with customer demand. It all begins with hardware selection for the skeleton of an efficient PostgreSQL database cluster. Then it’s on to preventing downtime as well as troubleshooting some real life problems that administrators commonly face. Next, we add database monitoring to the stack, using collectd, Nagios, and Graphite. And no stack is complete without replication using multiple internal and external tools, including the newly released pglogical extension. Pacemaker or Raft consensus tools are the final piece to grant the cluster the ability to heal itself. We even round off by tackling the complex problem of data scalability. This book exploits many new features introduced in PostgreSQL 9.6 to make the database more efficient and adaptive, and most importantly, keep it running.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.Packtpub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Restoring a database with Barman


As you might expect, Barman does not just create backups, it can also restore them. This functionality can be used to restore the current server, but its real power lies in its ability to restore data remotely. With this capability and a little bit of preparation, we can clone a PostgreSQL backup any number of times without straining the primary database server.

In this recipe, we will explore Barman's recovery aptitude and the steps necessary to start a PostgreSQL server cloned by Barman.

Getting ready

This recipe depends on Barman being installed on a backup server and at least one backup registered in the backup catalog. Please follow the Installing and configuring Barman and Backing up a database with Barman recipes before continuing.

How to do it...

For this procedure, we will need one new server. The backup server will remain pg-backup, but we need a target server for the restore. This server will be named pg-clone. Make sure to have the password for the...