Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 10

Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 10

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is an open source database used for handling large datasets (big data) and as a JSON document database. This book highlights the newly introduced features in PostgreSQL 10, and shows you how you can build better PostgreSQL applications, and administer your PostgreSQL database more efficiently. We begin by explaining advanced database design concepts in PostgreSQL 10, along with indexing and query optimization. You will also see how to work with event triggers and perform concurrent transactions and table partitioning, along with exploring SQL and server tuning. We will walk you through implementing advanced administrative tasks such as server maintenance and monitoring, replication, recovery, high availability, and much more. You will understand common and not-so-common troubleshooting problems and how you can overcome them. By the end of this book, you will have an expert-level command of advanced database functionalities and will be able to implement advanced administrative tasks with PostgreSQL 10.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Understanding execution plans

After digging into some important optimizations implemented into PostgreSQL, I want to shift your attention a bit more to execution plans. You have already seen some plans in this book. However, in order to make full use of plans, it is important to develop a systematic approach to reading this information. Reading plans systematically is exactly within the scope of this section.

Approaching plans systematically

The first thing you have to know is that an EXPLAIN clause can do quite a lot for you and, I would highly recommend making full use of those features.

As many readers might already know, an EXPLAIN ANALYZE clause will execute the query and return the plan, including real runtime information...