Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful opensource database management system; now recognized as the expert's choice for a wide range of applications, it has an enviable reputation for performance and stability. PostgreSQL provides an integrated feature set comprising relational database features, object-relational, text search, Geographical Info Systems, analytical tools for big data and JSON/XML document management. Starting with short and simple recipes, you will soon dive into core features, such as configuration, server control, tables, and data. You will tackle a variety of problems a database administrator usually encounters, from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database, and from using monitoring tools to using storage engines. Recipes based on important topics such as high availability, concurrency, replication, backup and recovery, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting are also given special importance. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to run, manage, and maintain PostgreSQL efficiently.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Stopping the server in an emergency

If nothing else is working, we may need to stop the server quickly, without caring about disconnecting the clients gently.

Break the glass in case of emergency!

How to do it...

The basic command to perform an emergency stop on the server is the following:

pg_ctl -D datadir stop -m immediate

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can also use:

pg_ctlcluster 9.6 main stop -m immediate

As mentioned in the previous recipe, this is just a wrapper around pg_ctl. From this example, we see that it can pass through the -m immediate option.

In the previous recipe, we have seen examples where the systemctl command was used to stop a server safely; however, that command cannot be used to perform an emergency stop.
...