PostgreSQL Administration Essentials... that sounds interesting! I think these were the first things I had in my mind when I was confronted with the idea of writing one more book on PostgreSQL. And, voila, here I am writing those first lines of this new book on PostgreSQL. My hope is that this little book will serve you well—providing help whenever it is needed.
Since I started my career as a PostgreSQL consultant (www.postgresql-support.de), there has always been a demand for a short, compact book on PostgreSQL administration. No big bloated thing but a book dealing exclusively with what people really need in their daily life. A small thing people can have on their tables all the time and which can be used for everyday administration problems. I am glad that I got the chance to take a shot on a book like that.
Chapter 1, Installing PostgreSQL, introduces you to the installation process and helps in learning how to install binaries, as well as, to compile PostgreSQL from source.
Chapter 2, Indexing and Performance Tuning, introduces you to indexes. This chapter is entirely dedicated to indexes, as well as, to performance-related issues. Indexes are a corner stone when it comes to performance and; therefore, a lot of focus is on indexes.
Chapter 3, Users and Permissions, introduces you to the security system. The basic concepts of the PostgreSQL security system, as well as, some advanced concepts are outlined in this chapter.
Chapter 4, Managing Logfiles, covers the managing of logfiles.
Chapter 5, Backup and Recovery, outlines how textual backups can be created and restored, as saving and restoring data is an essential task of every system administrator.
Chapter 6, Handling Replication and Improving Performance, covers various flavors of replication, as well as, PITR. Synchronous, as well as, asynchronous replications are also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 7, Monitoring PostgreSQL, covers monitoring to make sure that your systems are available and productive. To make sure that PostgreSQL stays up and running, monitoring is an important topic.
The entire book has been written on a Linux system, as well as, on Mac OS X. Some parts are Unix-specific. However, the biggest part of the book will also work just fine with Microsoft Windows.
So, all you will need is Windows or some Unix system to follow the given examples outlining all the technical issues subjected to this book.
This book has been written for those who want to administer a PostgreSQL database fast and efficiently. It contains valuable information to make your life as easy as possible. During your daily work, this little book will help you to quickly detect problems, as well as bottlenecks.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Note that we use -l here for simplicity reasons."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
pg_ctl -D /data -l /dev/null start
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
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