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)

Using GENERATED data columns

You are probably used to the idea that a column can have a default value that's been set by a function; this is how we use sequences to set column values in tables. The SQL Standard provides a new syntax for this, which is referred to as GENERATED … AS IDENTITY. PostgreSQL supports this, but we won't discuss that here.

We can also use views to dynamically calculate new columns as if the data had been stored. PostgreSQL 12+ allows the user to specify that columns can be generated and stored in the table automatically, which is easier and faster than writing a trigger to do this. This is a very important performance and usability feature since we can store data that may take significant time to calculate, so this is much better than just using views. We refer to this feature as GENERATED ALWAYS, which also follows the SQL Standard syntax.

How to do it…

Let's start with an example table:

CREATE TABLE example
( id ...