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

Controlling automatic database maintenance


Autovacuum is enabled by default in PostgreSQL and mostly does a great job of maintaining your PostgreSQL database. We say mostly because it doesn't know everything you do about the database, such as the best time to perform maintenance actions. Let's explore the settings that can be tuned so that you can use vacuums efficiently.

Getting ready

Exercising control requires some thinking about what you actually want:

  • What are the best times of day to do things? When are system resources more available?
  • Which days are quiet, and which are not?
  • Which tables are critical to the application, and which are not?

How to do it…

Perform the following steps:

  • The first thing to do is make sure that autovacuum is switched on, which is the default. Check that you have the following parameters enabled in yourpostgresql.conffile:

autovacuum = on 
track_counts = on 
  • PostgreSQL controls autovacuum with more than 40 individually tunable parameters that provide a wide range of...