Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli
Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

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)

Finding the configuration settings for your session

At some point, it will occur to you to ask: What are the current configuration settings?

Most settings can be changed in more than one way, and some ways do not affect all users or all sessions, so it is quite possible to get confused.

How to do it…

Your first thought is probably to look in postgresql.conf, which is the configuration file and is described in detail in the Updating the parameter file recipe. That works, but only as long as there is only one parameter file. If there are two, then maybe you're reading the wrong file! How would you know? So, the cautious and accurate way is to not trust a text file but to trust the server itself.

Moreover, you learned in the previous recipe, Setting configuration parameters in your programs that each parameter has a scope that determines when it can be set. Some parameters can be set through postgresql.conf, but others...