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

Avoiding auto-freezing and page corruptions


There are some aspects of VACUUM whose reason for existence is complex to explain, and occasionally they have negative behaviors. Let's look at these in more details and find some solutions to them.

PostgreSQL uses internal transaction identifiers that are 4 bytes long, so we only have 232 transaction IDs (about four billion). PostgreSQL starts again from the beginning when that wraps around, allocating new identifiers in a circular manner. The reason we do this is that moving to an 8-byte identifier has various other negative effects and costs that we would rather not pay, so we keep the 4-byte transaction identifier, which means we need to do regular sweeps to replace old transaction identifiers with a special value that is not interpreted in a circular way, which is called frozen transaction ID; that's why this procedure is known as freezing.

How to do it…

There are two routes that a row can take in PostgreSQL—a row version dies and needs to be...