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)

Installing and configuring Nagios

Nagios is a well-known monitoring tool. We won't make any claims that it is the best or most suitable tool for watching a highly available PostgreSQL installation. However, the community is large, the functionality is extensive and established, and interoperability with other tools and libraries is high. It was also one of the first to attain prominence and, as such, is a good way to learn how most monitoring systems function.

As an unfortunate consequence, the amount of installation prerequisites is rather lengthy. To get Nagios working properly, we need an HTTP server, Perl, and a mail daemon. Some plugins require PHP, while others need MySQL, SNMP (short for Simple Network Management Protocol) or any number of esoteric utilities and acronyms. There might be DBAs who also have strong skills as webmasters, but we can't depend on that...