Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 11 - Second Edition

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 11 - Second Edition

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

This second edition of Mastering PostgreSQL 11 helps you build dynamic database solutions for enterprise applications using the latest release of PostgreSQL, which enables database analysts to design both the physical and technical aspects of the system architecture with ease. This book begins with an introduction to the newly released features in PostgreSQL 11 to help you build efficient and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL applications. You’ll examine all of the advanced aspects of PostgreSQL in detail, including logical replication, database clusters, performance tuning, monitoring, and user management. You will also work with the PostgreSQL optimizer, configuring PostgreSQL for high speed, and see how to move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. As you progress through the chapters, you will cover transactions, locking, indexes, and optimizing queries to improve performance. Additionally, you’ll learn to manage network security and explore backups and replications, while understanding the useful extensions of PostgreSQL so that you can optimize the speed and performance of large databases. By the end of this book, you will be able to use your database to its utmost capacity by implementing advanced administrative tasks with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
PostgreSQL Overview

Checking for memory and I/O

Once we are done finding missing indexes, we 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 time 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 this out.

PostgreSQL exposes disk wait time 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 ...