Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 13 - Fourth Edition

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 13 - Fourth Edition

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

Thanks to its reliability, robustness, and high performance, PostgreSQL has become one of the most advanced open source databases on the market. This updated fourth edition will help you understand PostgreSQL administration and how to build dynamic database solutions for enterprise apps with the latest release of PostgreSQL, including designing both physical and technical aspects of the system architecture with ease. Starting with an introduction to the new features in PostgreSQL 13, this book will guide you in building efficient and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL apps. You’ll explore advanced PostgreSQL features, such as logical replication, database clusters, performance tuning, advanced indexing, monitoring, and user management, to manage and maintain your database. You’ll then work with the PostgreSQL optimizer, configure PostgreSQL for high speed, and move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The book also covers transactions, locking, and indexes, and shows you how to improve performance with query optimization. You’ll also focus on how to manage network security and work with backups and replication while exploring useful PostgreSQL extensions that optimize the performance of large databases. By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you’ll be able to get the most out of your database by executing advanced administrative tasks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Checking for memory and I/O

Once we are done finding missing indexes, we can inspect the 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 the 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 |
datname | name |
...
conflicts | bigint ...