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 data compression

As data volumes expand, we often think about whether there are ways to compress data to save space. There are many patents awarded in data compression, so the development of open source solutions has been slower than normal. PostgreSQL 14 contains some exciting innovations.

Getting ready

Make sure you're running Postgres 14+.

Various types of data compression are available for PostgreSQL:

  • Automatic compression of long data values (TOAST)
  • Extensions that offer compressed data types (for example, for JSON)
  • Compression of WAL files
  • Dump file compression
  • Base backup compression
  • SSL compression (this is considered insecure, so it's only used on private networks)
  • GiST and SP-GiST index compression
  • Btree index compression (also known as deduplication)

Only the first three types of compression will be discussed here, but we focus mainly on the parameters that allow us to control how long data values are automatically...