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)

Understanding and controlling crash recovery

Crash recovery is the PostgreSQL subsystem that saves us, should the server crash or fail as part of a system crash.

It's good to understand a little about it and to do what we can to control it in our favor.

How to do it...

If PostgreSQL crashes, there will be a message in the server log with the severity level set to PANIC. PostgreSQL will immediately restart and attempt to recover using the transaction log or Write-Ahead Log (WAL).

The WAL consists of a series of files written to the pg_wal subdirectory of the PostgreSQL data directory. Each change made to the database is recorded first in WAL, hence the name write-ahead log, as a synonym of transaction log. When a transaction...