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.
Chapter 1, Database Benchmarking, deals with a few major system component benchmarkings such as CPU, disk, and IOPS, besides database benchmarking. In this chapter, we will discuss a benchmarking frame called phoronix, along with disk RAID levels.
Chapter 2, Server Configuration and Control, deals with how to control the PostgreSQL instance behavior with the help of a few major configuration parameter settings.
Chapter 3, Device Optimization, discusses CPU, disk, and memory-related parameters. Besides this, we will be discussing memory components of PostgreSQL along with how to analyze the buffer cache contents.
Chapter 4, Monitoring Server Performance, discuss, various Unix/Linux related operating system utilities that can help the DBA in performance analysis and troubleshooting issues.
Chapter 5, Connection Pooling and Database Partitioning, covers connection pooling methods such as pgpool and pgbouncer. Also, we will be discussing a few partitioning techniques that PostgreSQL offers.
Chapter 6, High Availability and Replication, is about various high availability and replication solutions, including some popular third-party replication tools such as Slony, Londiste, and Bucardo. Also, we will be discussing how to set up the PostgreSQL XL cluster.
Chapter 7, Working with Third-Party Replication Management Utilities, discusses different third-party replication management tools, such as repmgr. Also, this chapter covers a backup management tool called Barman, along with WAL management tools, such as walctl.
Chapter 8, Database Monitoring and Performance, shows different aspects of how and what to monitor in the PostgreSQL instance to achieve the better performance. Also, in this chapter, we will be discussing a few troubleshooting techniques that will help the DBA team.
Chapter 9, Vacuum Internals, is about MVCC and how to handle PostgreSQL's transaction wraparound issues. Also, we will see how to control the bloat using snapshot threshold settings.
Chapter 10, Data Migration from Other Databases to PostgreSQL and Upgrading PostgreSQL Cluster, covers heterogeneous replication between Oracle and PostgreSQL using Goldengate.
Chapter 11, Query Optimization, discusses the functionality of PostgreSQL query planner. Besides this, we will be discussing several query processing algorithms with examples.
Chapter 12, Database Indexing, covers various index loop techniques PostgreSQL follows. Besides, we will be discussing various index management methods, such as how to find unused or missing indexes from the database.
In general, a modern Unix-compatible platform should be able to run PostgreSQL. To make the most out of this book, you also require CentOS 7. The minimum hardware required to install and run PostgreSQL is as follows:
1 GHz processor
1 GB of RAM
512 MB of HDD
If you are a developer or administrator with limited PostgreSQL knowledge and want to develop your skills with this great open source database, then this book is ideal for you. Learning how to enhance the database performance is always an exciting topic to everyone, and this book will show you enough ways to enhance the database performance.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows.
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In Linux, tmpfs is a temporary filesystem, which uses the RAM rather than the disk storage."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts/memory Phoronix Test Suite v6.8.0 Installed: pts/ramspeed-1.4.0 To Install: pts/stream-1.3.1 To Install: pts/cachebench-1.0.0
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select the product pack Fusion Middleware and the Linux x86-64 platform. Click on the Go button."
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