Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By : Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar
Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By: Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. It also provides NoSQL capabilities and very rich data types and extensions. All of this makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in software systems. If you run a database, you want it to perform well and you want to be able to secure it. As the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL has unique built-in ways to achieve these goals. This book will show you a multitude of ways to enhance your database’s performance and give you insights into measuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL database to achieve better performance. This book is your one-stop guide to elevate your PostgreSQL knowledge to the next level. First, you’ll get familiarized with essential developer/administrator concepts such as load balancing, connection pooling, and distributing connections to multiple nodes. Next, you will explore memory optimization techniques before exploring the security controls offered by PostgreSQL. Then, you will move on to the essential database/server monitoring and replication strategies with PostgreSQL. Finally, you will learn about query processing algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Query plan node structure


In this recipe, we will be discussing the explain plan tree structure.

Getting ready

PostgreSQL generates a set of plans before choosing an optimal plan that it is going to execute, based on the collected statistics about the relations. That is, the plan we are going to get when we use the EXPLAIN command along with the SQL statement is the optimal plan for that query. We also used EXPLAIN statements extensively on previous topics, and now we are going to understand the plan structure, and the significance of each value in it.

How to do it…

Let's run a basic EXPLAIN query and evaluate it as follows:

benchmarksql=# EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM bmsql_customer WHERE c_id=0;                                                                                      
                                           QUERY PLAN                                           
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Index Scan using bmsql_customer_pkey...