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)

Making bulk data changes using server-side procedures with transactions

In some cases, you'll need to make bulk changes to your data. In many cases, you need to scroll through the data making changes according to a complex set of rules. You have a few choices in that case:

  • Write a single SQL statement that can do everything.
  • Open a cursor and read the rows out, and then make changes with a client-side program.
  • Write a procedure that uses a cursor to read the rows and make changes using server-side SQL.

Writing a single SQL statement that does everything is sometimes possible, but if you need to do more than just use UPDATE, then it becomes difficult very quickly. The main difficulty is that the SQL statement isn't restartable, so if you need to interrupt it, you will lose all of your work.

Reading all the rows back to a client-side program can be very slow – if you need to write this kind of program, it is better to do it all...