Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 10

Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 10

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is an open source database used for handling large datasets (big data) and as a JSON document database. This book highlights the newly introduced features in PostgreSQL 10, and shows you how you can build better PostgreSQL applications, and administer your PostgreSQL database more efficiently. We begin by explaining advanced database design concepts in PostgreSQL 10, along with indexing and query optimization. You will also see how to work with event triggers and perform concurrent transactions and table partitioning, along with exploring SQL and server tuning. We will walk you through implementing advanced administrative tasks such as server maintenance and monitoring, replication, recovery, high availability, and much more. You will understand common and not-so-common troubleshooting problems and how you can overcome them. By the end of this book, you will have an expert-level command of advanced database functionalities and will be able to implement advanced administrative tasks with PostgreSQL 10.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Checking for memory and I/O

Once you are done finding missing indexes, you can inspect memory and I/O. To figure out what is going on, it makes sense to activate track_io_timing. If it is on, PostgreSQL will collect information about disk wait and present it to you.

Often the main question asked by a customer is: if we add more disks, is it going to be faster? It is possible to guess what will happen, but in general, measuring is the better and more useful strategy. Enabling track_io_timing will help you gather the data to really figure it out.

PostgreSQL exposes disk wait in various ways. One way to inspect things is to take a look at pg_stat_database:

test=# \d pg_stat_database
View "pg_catalog.pg_stat_database"
Column | Type | Modifiers
----------------+--------------------------+-----------
datid | oid ...