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

Dealing with bloating tables and indexes


In this recipe, we will be discussing how to deal with bloats using PostgreSQL's garbage collector processes.

Getting ready

We all know that PostgreSQL's storage implementation is based on MVCC. As a result of MVCC, PostgreSQL needs to reclaim the dead space/bloats from the physical storage, using its garbage collector processes called vacuum or autovacuum. If we do not reclaim these dead rows, then the table or index will keep growing until the disk space gets full. In a worst case scenario, a single live row in a table can cause the disk space outage. We will discuss these garbage collector processes in more detail in the next recipe, but for now let's find out which tables or indexes have more dead space.

How to do it...

To identify the bloat of an object, we have to use the pgstattuple extension, otherwise we have to follow the approach that is mentioned at: http://www.databasesoup.com/2014/10/new-table-bloat-query.html:

postgres=# CREATE EXTENSION...