Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 15 - Fifth Edition

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 15 - Fifth Edition

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

Starting with an introduction to the newly released features of PostgreSQL 15, this updated fifth edition will help you get to grips with PostgreSQL administration and how to build dynamic database solutions for enterprise apps, including designing both physical and technical aspects of the system. You'll explore advanced PostgreSQL features, such as logical replication, database clusters, advanced indexing, and user management to manage and maintain your database. You'll then work with the PostgreSQL optimizer, configure PostgreSQL for high speed, and move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Among the other skills that the book will help you build, you’ll cover transactions, handling recursions, working with JSON and JSONB data, and setting up a Patroni cluster. It will show you how to improve performance with query optimization. You'll also focus on managing network security and work with backups and replication while exploring useful PostgreSQL extensions that optimize the performance of large databases. By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you’ll be able to use your database to its utmost capacity by implementing advanced administrative tasks with ease.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Using performance-related features

Of course, there are also a couple of performance-related features that have made it into PostgreSQL core.

Adding multiple compression algorithms

It is now possible to define the compression algorithm for various things. This is especially important for TOAST. We can control this behavior using the ALTER TABLE command:

...
   ALTER [ COLUMN ] column_name
SET STORAGE { PLAIN | EXTERNAL | EXTENDED | MAIN }
    ALTER [ COLUMN ] column_name SET COMPRESSION compression_method
...

Depending on what type of data is compressed, different algorithms can be really helpful and speed things up considerably.

Handling parallel queries more efficiently

In every major release since PostgreSQL 9.6, new features to handle parallelism have been added. The same is true for version 15. It is now possible to handle DISTINCT in parallel, which was previously not possible (only single core).

With the introduction of...