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)

Identifying and fixing bloated tables and indexes

PostgreSQL implements Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC), which allows users to read data at the same time as writers make changes. This is an important feature for concurrency in database applications as it can allow the following:

  • Better performance because of fewer locks
  • Greatly reduced deadlocking
  • Simplified application design and management

Bloated tables and indexes are a natural consequence of MVCC design in PostgreSQL. Bloat is caused mainly by updates, as we must retain both the old and new updates for a certain period. Since these extra row versions are required to provide MVCC, some amount of bloat is normal and acceptable. Tuning to remove bloat completely isn't useful and probably a waste of time.

Bloating results in increased disk consumption, as well as performance loss – if a table is twice as big as...