Preface
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source database management system with an enviable reputation for high performance and stability. With many new features in its arsenal, PostgreSQL 14 allows you to scale up your PostgreSQL infrastructure. With this book, you'll take a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration.
This book will get you up and running with all the latest features of PostgreSQL 14 while helping you explore the entire database ecosystem. You'll learn how to tackle a variety of problems and pain points you may face as a database administrator, such as creating tables, managing views, improving performance, and securing your database. As you make progress, the book will draw attention to important topics such as monitoring roles, validating backups, regular maintenance, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 14 database. This will help you understand roles, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. Along with updated recipes, this book touches upon important areas such as using generated columns, TOAST compression, PostgreSQL on the cloud, and much more.
By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you'll have gained the knowledge you need to manage your PostgreSQL 14 database efficiently, both in the cloud and on-premises.
Who this book is for
This Postgres 14 book is for database administrators, data architects, database developers, and anyone with an interest in planning and running live production databases using PostgreSQL 14. Those looking for hands-on solutions to any problem associated with PostgreSQL 14 administration will also find this book useful. Some experience with handling PostgreSQL databases will help you to make the most out of this book, however, it is a useful resource even if you are just beginning your Postgres journey.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, First Steps, introduces you to PostgreSQL 14; it explains how to download and install PostgreSQL 14, connect to a PostgreSQL server, enable server access to the network or remote users, use graphical administration tools, use PSQL query and scripting tools, change your password securely, avoid hardcoding your password, use a connection service file, and troubleshoot a failed connection. This chapter also covers how to access PostgreSQL in the cloud.
Chapter 2, Exploring the Database, demonstrates how to identify the version of the database server you are using, as well as the server uptime. It helps you locate the database server files, the database server message log, and the database's system identifier. It explains how to list a database on the database server, and it contains recipes that let you know the number of tables in your database, how much disk space is used by the database and tables, what the biggest tables are, how many rows a table has, how to estimate rows in a table, and how to understand object dependencies.
Chapter 3, Server Configuration, explains topics such as Reading the Fine Manual (RTFM), how to plan a new database, how to change the parameters in your programs, the current configuration settings, the parameters that are at non-default settings, how to update the parameter file, how to set parameters for particular groups of users, the basic server configuration checklist, how to add an external module into the PostgreSQL server, and how to run the server in power-saving mode.
Chapter 4, Server Control, provides information about starting the database server manually, stopping the server quickly and safely, stopping the server in an emergency, reloading the server configuration files, restarting the server quickly, preventing new connections, restricting users to just one session each, and pushing users off the system. It contains recipes that help you choose a design for multi-tenancy, as well as recipes that explain how to use multiple schemas, give users their own private database, run multiple database servers on one system, and set up a connection pool.
Chapter 5, Tables and Data, guides you through the process of choosing good names for database objects. Additionally, it explains how to handle objects with quoted names, enforce the same name, maintain the same definition for columns, identify and remove duplicate rows, prevent duplicate rows, find a unique key for a set of data, generate test data, randomly sample data, load data from a spreadsheet, and load data from flat files.
Chapter 6, Security, provides recipes on revoking user access to a table, granting user access to a table, creating a new user, temporarily preventing a user from connecting, removing a user without dropping their data, checking whether all users have a secure password, giving limited superuser powers to specific users, auditing DDL changes, auditing data changes, integrating with LDAP, connecting using SSL, and encrypting sensitive data.
Chapter 7, Database Administration, provides recipes on useful topics such as writing a script where all either succeed or fail, writing a psql script that exits on the first error, performing actions on many tables, adding and removing columns in tables, changing the data type of a column, adding and removing schemas, moving objects between schemas, adding and removing tablespaces, moving objects between tablespaces, accessing objects in other PostgreSQL databases, and enabling views to be updated.
Chapter 8, Monitoring and Diagnosis, provides recipes that answer questions such as whether the user is connected, what they are running, whether they are active or blocked, who they are being blocked by, whether anybody is using a specific table, when the table was last used, how much disk space is being used by temporary data, and why your queries could be slowing down. It also demonstrates how to investigate and report a bug, produce a daily summary report of log file errors, kill a specific session, and resolve an in-doubt prepared transaction.
Chapter 9, Regular Maintenance, provides useful recipes on how to control automatic database maintenance, avoid auto-freezing and page corruptions, avoid transaction wraparound, remove old prepared transactions, offer solutions for heavy users of temporary tables, identify and fix bloated tables and indexes, maintain indexes, find unused indexes, carefully remove unwanted indexes, and plan maintenance.
Chapter 10, Performance and Concurrency, covers topics such as how to find slow SQL statements, collect regular statistics from pg_stat* views, discover what makes SQL slow, reduce the number of rows returned, simplify complex SQL, speed up queries without rewriting them, understand why some queries are not using an index, force a query to use an index, use optimistic locking, and report performance problems. And, of course, you'll learn about the new parallel query features, tablesample, and time-series partitioning.
Chapter 11, Backup and Recovery, explains that backups are essential, although this topic is only covered very briefly. So, this chapter provides useful information about the backup and recovery of your PostgreSQL database through recipes on how to understand and control crash recovery and how to plan backups. Additionally, you will learn about the hot logical backup of one database, the hot logical backup of all databases, the hot logical backup of all tables in a tablespace, the backup of database object definitions, the standalone hot physical database backup, the hot physical backup, and continuous archiving. It also includes topics such as the recovery of all databases, recovery to a point in time, the recovery of a dropped or damaged table, the recovery of a dropped or damaged database, the recovery of a dropped or damaged tablespace, how to improve the performance of backup/recovery, and incremental/differential backup and restore.
Chapter 12, Replication and Upgrades, explains that replication isn't magic, although it can be pretty cool. It's even cooler when it works, and that's what this chapter is all about. This chapter covers replication concepts, replication best practices, how to set up file-based log shipping replication, how to set up streaming log replication, how to manage log shipping replication, how to manage hot standby, synchronous replication, how to upgrade to a new minor release, in-place major upgrades, major upgrades online, and logical replication and Postgres-BDR.
To get the most out of this book
In order for this book to be useful, you need access to a PostgreSQL client that is allowed to execute queries on a server. Ideally, you'll also be the server administrator. Full client and server packages for PostgreSQL are available for most popular operating systems at http://www.postgresql.org/download/. All the examples here are executed at the Command Prompt, usually running the psql program. This makes them applicable to most platforms. It's straightforward to do most of these operations by using a GUI tool for PostgreSQL, such as pgAdmin or OmniDB:
- pgAdmin: https://www.pgadmin.org/download/
- OmniDB: https://github.com/OmniDB/OmniDB
Download the example code files
You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/PostgreSQL-14-Administration-Cookbook. If there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781803248974_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Many experienced PostgreSQL DBAs will prefer to execute their own VACUUM commands."
A block of code is set as follows:
autovacuum = on track_counts = on
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
$ ln -sf autovacuum.conf.night autovacuum.conf $ pg_ctl reload
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
VACUUM (DISABLE_PAGE_SKIPPING);
Tips or important notes
Appear like this.
Sections
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, use these sections as follows:
Getting ready
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.
How to do it…
This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.
How it works…
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
There's more…
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make you more knowledgeable about the recipe.
See also
This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.
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