Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL 10 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL 10 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open source databases in the world, supporting the most advanced features included in SQL standards. This book will familiarize you with the latest features released in PostgreSQL 10. We’ll start with a thorough introduction to PostgreSQL and the new features introduced in PostgreSQL 10. We’ll cover the Data Definition Language (DDL) with an emphasis on PostgreSQL, and the common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You’ll learn to create tables, define integrity constraints, build indexes, and set up views and other schema objects. Moving on, we’ll cover the concepts of Data Manipulation Language (DML) and PostgreSQL server-side programming capabilities using PL/pgSQL. We’ll also explore the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL and connect to your PostgreSQL database to manipulate data objects. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the basics of PostgreSQL 10 and will have the necessary skills to build efficient database solutions.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 12. The PostgreSQL Catalog

The PostgreSQL system catalog and system administration functions can aid both developers and administrators to keep the database clean and performant. System catalogs can be used to automate several tasks, such as finding tables without indexes, finding dependencies between database objects, and extracting information about the database using health checks such as table bloats, database size, and so on. Information extracted from the system catalog can be employed in monitoring solutions such as Nagios and in dynamic SQL. This chapter will discuss some tasks a developer and administrator needs to do on a daily basis, such as cleaning up database data and unused objects, building an index automatically, and monitoring database objects access. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • An overview of the system catalog
  • System catalog for administrators
  • Using system catalog for database clean up.
  • The usage of system catalog for performance tuning
  • Selective...