Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL - Second Edition

By : Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi
1 (2)
Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL - Second Edition

1 (2)
By: Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi

Overview of this book

The latest edition of this PostgreSQL book will help you to start using PostgreSQL from absolute scratch, helping you to quickly understand the internal workings of the database. With a structured approach and practical examples, go on a journey that covers the basics, from SQL statements and how to run server-side programs, to configuring, managing, securing, and optimizing database performance. This new edition will not only help you get to grips with all the recent changes within the PostgreSQL ecosystem but will also dig deeper into concepts like partitioning and replication with a fresh set of examples. The book is also equipped with Docker images for each chapter which makes the learning experience faster and easier. Starting with the absolute basics of databases, the book sails through to advanced concepts like window functions, logging, auditing, extending the database, configuration, partitioning, and replication. It will also help you seamlessly migrate your existing database system to PostgreSQL and contains a dedicated chapter on disaster recovery. Each chapter ends with practice questions to test your learning at regular intervals. By the end of this book, you will be able to install, configure, manage, and develop applications against a PostgreSQL database.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
20
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21
Index

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how PostgreSQL manages configuration through a main text file, postgresql.conf, that can be split into smaller files, including the automatically loaded postgresql.auto.conf, which is always loaded at the end of the configuration process. Every configuration option can be edited in the configuration file and can be inspected within the database thanks to dedicated system catalogs. This allows the database administrator to not only have a clear understanding of the currently running configuration but to also search for configuration errors and incorrectly loaded settings.

PostgreSQL also collects statistics; that is, runtime data that was gathered during the cluster’s operational time. Those statistics can help an administrator understand what is going on, or what happened in the near past, in the cluster. Thanks to a different set of catalogs, which was exposed in this chapter, you learned how to dig into the details of all the information...