After our brief introduction to the transaction log in general, it is time to focus on the process of transaction log archiving. As we have already seen, the transaction log contains a sequence of binary changes that are made to the storage system. So, why not use it to replicate database instances and do a lot of other cool stuff, such as archiving?
Configuring for archiving
The first thing we want to do in this chapter is to create a configuration to perform standard Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR). There are a couple of advantages of using PITR over ordinary dumps:
- We will lose less data because we can restore the data to a certain point in time and not just to the fixed backup point.
- Restoring will be faster because indexes don't have to be created from scratch. They are just copied over and are ready to use.
Configuration for PITR is easy. Just a handful of changes have to be made in the postgresql.conf file as shown in the next listing...