Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL

By : Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi
Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL

By: Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the fastest-growing open source object-relational database management systems (DBMS) in the world. As well as being easy to use, it’s scalable and highly efficient. In this book, you’ll explore PostgreSQL 12 and 13 and learn how to build database solutions using it. Complete with hands-on tutorials, this guide will teach you how to achieve the right database design required for a reliable environment. You'll learn how to install and configure a PostgreSQL server and even manage users and connections. The book then progresses to key concepts of relational databases, before taking you through the Data Definition Language (DDL) and commonly used DDL commands. To build on your skills, you’ll understand how to interact with the live cluster, create database objects, and use tools to connect to the live cluster. You’ll then get to grips with creating tables, building indexes, and designing your database schema. Later, you'll explore the Data Manipulation Language (DML) and server-side programming capabilities of PostgreSQL using PL/pgSQL, before learning how to monitor, test, and troubleshoot your database application to ensure high-performance and reliability. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with the Postgres database and be able to set up your own PostgreSQL instance and use it to build robust solutions.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started
5
Section 2: Interacting with the Database
12
Section 3: Administering the Cluster
20
Section 4: Replication
23
Section 5: The PostegreSQL Ecosystem

Learning WAL archiving and PITR

In this section, we are going to look at the physical way of storing data in PostgreSQL in more detail. We will begin to process segment WAL manually and then move on to automatic modes, which make the work of the DBA much easier. Classic backups are made using the pg_dump command, and they are also called logical backups. What we want to do now is take a physical backup of the data; we want to obtain a continuous snapshot of our database. This technique offers the DBA the possibility to restore the database to any point in the past; this technique, called PITR, is widely used as a disaster recovery technique. This technique allows us to go back to our PostgreSQL cluster at an exact point in the past before a malicious event occurred (for example, a DROP of a table). This technique is often used by DBAs if we want to take a certain snapshot of a production environment back to a test environment.

PITR – the manual way

In the Chapter 14, Backup and...