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)

Performing actions on many tables

As a database administrator, you will often need to apply multiple commands as part of the same overall task. That task could be one of the following:

  • Many different actions on multiple tables
  • The same action on multiple tables
  • The same action on multiple tables in parallel
  • Different actions-one on each table-in parallel

The first is a general case where you need to make a set of coordinated changes. The solution is write a script, as we've already discussed. We can also call this static scripting because you write the script manually and then execute it.

The second type of task can be achieved very simply with dynamic scripts, where we write a script that writes another script. This technique is the main topic of this recipe.

Performing actions in parallel sounds really cool, and it would be useful if it were easy. In some ways it is,...