Book Image

PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Shaun Thomas
Book Image

PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Shaun Thomas

Overview of this book

Databases are nothing without the data they store. In the event of an outage or technical catastrophe, immediate recovery is essential. This updated edition ensures that you will learn the important concepts related to node architecture design, as well as techniques such as using repmgr for failover automation. From cluster layout and hardware selection to software stacks and horizontal scalability, this PostgreSQL cookbook will help you build a PostgreSQL cluster that will survive crashes, resist data corruption, and grow smoothly with customer demand. You’ll start by understanding how to plan a PostgreSQL database architecture that is resistant to outages and scalable, as it is the scaffolding on which everything rests. With the bedrock established, you'll cover the topics that PostgreSQL database administrators need to know to manage a highly available cluster. This includes configuration, troubleshooting, monitoring and alerting, backups through proxies, failover automation, and other considerations that are essential for a healthy PostgreSQL cluster. Later, you’ll learn to use multi-master replication to maximize server availability. Later chapters will guide you through managing major version upgrades without downtime. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to build an efficient and adaptive PostgreSQL 12 database cluster.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Starting with base options

As a cluster resource manager, Pacemaker has some defaults that we are interested in changing. Pacemaker is very powerful, so it makes several assumptions about the composition of cluster resources and nodes it controls. One of which is that there are several nodes and not just two.

This works well for large cooperative networks of web servers or independent services that can operate transiently. However, we have two nodes that are very much dependent on shared storage that can only be used by one node at a time. So, this recipe is going to perform three tasks:

  1. Disable STONITH because we don't currently have STONITH-enabled hardware.
  2. Disable cluster quorum because two systems cannot produce a meaningful vote.
  1. Enable resource stickiness to prevent disruptive automated node swaps.
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