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

Understanding memory units in PostgreSQL


In this recipe, we will be discussing the memory components of PostgreSQL instances.

Getting ready

PostgreSQL uses several memory components for each unique usage. That is, it uses dedicated memory areas for transactions, sort/join operations, maintenance operations, and so on. If the configured memory component doesn't fit the usage of the live application, then we may hit a performance issue, where PostgreSQL tries for more I/O.

How to do it...

Let us discuss about, how to tune the major PostgreSQL memory components:

shared_buffers

This is the major memory area that PostgreSQL uses for executing the transactions. On most Linux operating systems, it is recommended to allocate at least 25% of RAM as shared buffers, by leaving 75% of RAM to OS, OS cache, and for other PostgreSQL memory components. PostgreSQL provide multiple ways to create these shared buffers. The supported shared memory creation techniques are POSIX shared memory, System V shared memory...