Book Image

PostgreSQL 11 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli, Sudheer Kumar Meesala
Book Image

PostgreSQL 11 Administration Cookbook

By: Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli, Sudheer Kumar Meesala

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source database management system with an enviable reputation for high performance and stability. With many new features in its arsenal, PostgreSQL 11 allows you to scale up your PostgreSQL infrastructure. This book takes a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration. The book will introduce you to new features such as logical replication, native table partitioning, additional query parallelism, and much more to help you to understand and control, crash recovery and plan backups. You will learn how to tackle a variety of problems and pain points for any database administrator such as creating tables, managing views, improving performance, and securing your database. As you make steady progress, the book will draw attention to important topics such as monitoring roles, backup, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 11 database to help you understand roles and produce a summary of log files, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. By the end of this book, you will have the necessary knowledge to manage your PostgreSQL 11 database efficiently.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Exploring the Database

To understand PostgreSQL, you need to see it in use. An empty database is like a ghost town without houses.

For now, we will assume that you already have a database. There are over a thousand books on how to design your own database from nothing. So, here, we aim to help people who are still learning to use the PostgreSQL database management system with handy routines to explore the database. 

The best way to start is by asking some simple questions to orient yourself and begin the process of understanding. Incidentally, these are also questions you'll need to answer if you ask someone else for help.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

  • What type of server is this?
  • What version is the server?
  • What is the server uptime?
  • Locating the database server files
  • Locating the database server's message log
  • Locating the database's system identifier
  • Listing databases on the database server
  • How many tables are there in a database?
  • How much disk space does a database...