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)

Monitoring

One aspect of PostgreSQL administration that is unfortunately ignored too frequently is system monitoring. Provisioning, constructing, and maintaining a high availability cluster is difficult by itself without the extra complications inherent in setting up yet more infrastructure.

Larger companies with an established Network Operations Center (NOC) probably have extremely mature incidence response and escalation procedures in place. Others may rely on a few basic monitors and alerts or ad hoc scripts set to trigger on certain thresholds. If we aren't part of the first group, we certainly can't include ourselves in the second and consider our cluster protected. When availability is important for business continuity, we should take the time to ensure that its activity is continuously reported, graphed, and summarized.

In this chapter, we will focus on what we...