Book Image

PostgreSQL 10 Administration Cookbook - Fourth Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL 10 Administration Cookbook - Fourth Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source database management system with an enviable reputation for high performance and stability. With many new features in its arsenal, PostgreSQL 10 allows users to scale up their PostgreSQL infrastructure. This book takes a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration. Throughout this book, you will be introduced to these new features such as logical replication, native table partitioning, additional query parallelism, and much more. You will learn how to tackle a variety of problems that are basically the pain points for any database administrator - from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database. More importantly, the book pays special attention to topics such as monitoring roles, backup, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 10 database, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. By the end of this book, you will know everything you need to know to be the go-to PostgreSQL expert in your organization.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Forcing a query to use an index

Often, we think we know better than the database optimizer. Most of the time your expectation is wrong and if you look carefully you'll see that. So recheck everything and come back later.

It is a classic error to try to get the database optimizer to use indexes when the database has very little data in it. Put some genuine data in the database first, then worry about it. Better yet, load some data on a test server first, rather than doing this in production.

Sometimes the optimizer gets it wrong. You feel elated, and possibly angry, that the database optimizer doesn't see what you see. Please bear in mind that the data distributions within your database change over time, and this causes the optimizer to change its plans over time, also. If you have found a case where the optimizer is wrong, it might have been correct last week, and will...