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)

Controlling automatic database maintenance

autovacuum is enabled by default in PostgreSQL and mostly does a great job of maintaining your PostgreSQL database. We say mostly because it doesn't know everything you do about the database, such as the best time to perform maintenance actions. Let's explore the settings that can be tuned so that you can use vacuums efficiently.

Getting ready

Exercising control requires some thinking about what you want:

  • What are the best times of day to do things? When are system resources more available?
  • Which days are quiet, and which are not?
  • Which tables are critical to the application, and which are not?

How to do it…

Perform the following steps:

  1. The first thing you must do is make sure that autovacuum is switched on, which is the default. Check that you have the following parameters enabled in your postgresql.conf file:
    autovacuum = on 
    track_counts = on 
  2. PostgreSQL...