Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By : Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar
Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By: Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. It also provides NoSQL capabilities and very rich data types and extensions. All of this makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in software systems. If you run a database, you want it to perform well and you want to be able to secure it. As the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL has unique built-in ways to achieve these goals. This book will show you a multitude of ways to enhance your database’s performance and give you insights into measuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL database to achieve better performance. This book is your one-stop guide to elevate your PostgreSQL knowledge to the next level. First, you’ll get familiarized with essential developer/administrator concepts such as load balancing, connection pooling, and distributing connections to multiple nodes. Next, you will explore memory optimization techniques before exploring the security controls offered by PostgreSQL. Then, you will move on to the essential database/server monitoring and replication strategies with PostgreSQL. Finally, you will learn about query processing algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Preventing page corruption


Database corruption is a major concern, since in a worst case scenario we may lose valuable customer related data. It is also a painful job, to recover the corrupted disk or restore the data from previous backups. Database corruption can happen due to the following reasons:

  • Bad hardware

  • Bug in database software

  • Bug in a kernel

  • Bad database configuration

As like other database management systems, PostgreSQL also provides few configuration settings, which will try to avoid the page corruption. If page corruption happens at disk level, then PostgreSQL has the ability to bypass the corrupted data, and return the uncorrupted data.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will be discussing how to enable the checksums for each data block, and how to retain the uncorrupted data when any corruption happens.

To enable the checksums for each data block, we have to initialize the PostgreSQL cluster with the --data-checksums option using the initdb command. Adding this checksum option will...