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

Preparing systems for the stack

Before we can use LVM, DRBD, or XFS on our servers, we must take some preliminary steps. We've never encountered a Linux system that is optimized for this kind of advanced usage directly after installation. In this recipe, we will modify several configuration files and even reboot the server.

We're trying to put each system in a standard state that we'll use for all future database servers. This means that LVM needs to ignore some devices to prevent disrupting DRBD, the initial RAM disks during boot should reflect this same allocation, and device performance shouldn't be lost between abstraction layers. We also need all of the tools that we'll use throughout this chapter.

This recipe will guarantee that these criteria are true, so be prepared!

Getting ready

The only things we should need at this point are the ability to run commands as root and a device dedicated to database storage. However, if you are running a RHEL system (not a derivative...