Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli
5 (1)
Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

5 (1)
By: Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli

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 14 allows you to scale up your PostgreSQL infrastructure. With this book, you'll take a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration. This book will get you up and running with all the latest features of PostgreSQL 14 while helping you explore the entire database ecosystem. You’ll learn how to tackle a variety of problems and pain points you may face as a database administrator such as creating tables, managing views, improving performance, and securing your database. As you make progress, the book will draw attention to important topics such as monitoring roles, validating backups, regular maintenance, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 14 database. This will help you understand roles, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. Along with updated recipes, this book touches upon important areas like using generated columns, TOAST compression, PostgreSQL on the cloud, and much more. By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to manage your PostgreSQL 14 database efficiently, both in the cloud and on-premise.
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 what we can do 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 the 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, which is a synonym for a transaction log. Note that the former is probably more accurate, since, in the WAL, there are also changes not related to transactions. When a transaction commits, the default (and safe) behavior is to force the...