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)

Finding a unique key for a set of data

Sometimes, it can be difficult to find a unique set of key columns that describe the data. In this recipe, we will analyze the data in the database to allow us to identify the column(s) that together form a unique key. This is useful when a key is not documented, not defined, or has been defined incorrectly.

Getting ready

Let's start with a small table, where the answer is fairly obvious:

postgres=# select * from ord;

We assume that the output is as follows:

orderid  | customerid |  amt  
---------+------------+--------
   10677 |          2 |   5.50
    5019 |          3 | 277.44
    9748 |          3 |  77.17
(3 rows)

How to do it…

First of all...