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

Logging slow statements


In this recipe, we will be discussing how to track the slow running SQL statements.

Getting ready

In any database management system, checking the database logs is a regular action by the developers/DBA to find the root cause, for any database related issues. PostgreSQL provides various log settings, which controls its logger process. By using proper logging settings, we can control the amount of log messages, and the format of the log content. In some cases, having proper logging settings will help in debugging the situations as mentioned here.

Sometimes, it is not an easy job to figure out why a query is running very slowly, as there could be many reasons behind the slowness of the execution. The reasons could be:

  • Concurrent locks on the same table

  • Volume of the data

  • Bad execution plan for the query and so on

As we discussed previously, if you have proper logging settings, PostgreSQL will log some useful information such as query duration, process ID, client host details...