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)

Validating backups

In this recipe, we will use the data checksum feature to detect data corruption caused by I/O malfunctioning in advance.

It is important to discover such problems as soon as possible. For instance, we want a chance to recover lost data from one of our older backups, or we may want to stop data errors before they spread to the rest of the database when new data depends on existing data.

Getting ready

This feature is disabled by default, since it results in some overhead; it can be enabled when the cluster is initialized by using the --data-checksums option of the initdb utility, or on an existing cluster, with pg_checksum --enable.

Also, before trying this recipe, you should be familiar with how to take backups and how to restore them afterward, which are the subjects of most of this chapter.

How to do it…

First, check whether data checksums are enabled:

postgres=# SHOW data_checksums ;
 data_checksums...