Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 12 - Third Edition

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 12 - Third Edition

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

Thanks to its reliability, robustness, and high performance, PostgreSQL has become the most advanced open source database on the market. This third edition of Mastering PostgreSQL helps you build dynamic database solutions for enterprise applications using the latest release of PostgreSQL, which enables database analysts to design both physical and technical aspects of system architecture with ease. Starting with an introduction to the newly released features in PostgreSQL 12, this book will help you build efficient and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL applications. You’ll thoroughly examine the advanced features of PostgreSQL, including logical replication, database clusters, performance tuning, monitoring, and user management. You’ll also work with the PostgreSQL optimizer, configure PostgreSQL for high speed, and understand how to move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover transactions, locking, indexes, and how to optimize queries for improved performance. Additionally, you’ll learn how to manage network security and explore backups and replications while understanding useful PostgreSQL extensions to help you in optimizing the performance of large databases. By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you’ll be able to get the most out of your database by implementing advanced administrative tasks effortlessly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Basic Overview
4
Section 2: Advanced Concepts

Understanding additional B-tree features

In PostgreSQL, indexing is a large field and covers many aspects of database work. As I have outlined in this book already, indexing is the key to performance. There is no good performance without proper indexing. Therefore, it is worth inspecting the indexing-related features that we will cover in the following subtopics in detail.

Combined indexes

In my job, as a professional PostgreSQL support vendor, I am often asked about the difference between combined and individual indexes. In this section, I will try to shed some light on this question.

The general rule is that if a single index can answer your question, it is usually the best choice. However, you cannot index all possible...