Book Image

PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

By : Shaun Thomas
Book Image

PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

By: Shaun Thomas

Overview of this book

A comprehensive series of dependable recipes to design, build, and implement a PostgreSQL server architecture free of common pitfalls that can operate for years to come. Each chapter is packed with instructions and examples to simplify even highly complex database operations. If you are a PostgreSQL DBA working on Linux systems who want a database that never gives up, this book is for you. If you've ever experienced a database outage, restored from a backup, spent hours trying to repair a malfunctioning cluster, or simply want to guarantee system stability, this book is definitely for you.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Introduction

One element that is absolutely required for any highly available PostgreSQL installation is replication. It does not matter if we have a SAN that provides disk redundancy, nor is DRBD or other block-level replication sufficient to protect our investment. Duplicating and backing up data is always a good practice, but when it comes to availability, we need online copies of the database.

Similarly, if other departments need data that resides in our OLTP database, how can we provide it safely? In ideal circumstances, we can supply a copy of the necessary tables. This way, we don't strain the primary database with ad hoc report-based queries. A new DBA might try to accomplish this by building a synchronization library or performing scheduled extracts and copies into a remote database. However, there are easier ways!

PostgreSQL gives us methods to build and maintain a fully online copy of our primary database. Furthermore, there are existing utilities to duplicate tables when...