Author: Simon Riggs and Gianno Ciolli
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Pages: 608
ISBN: 978-1803248974
Print:1803248971
Kindle: B09R4VBHX3
Audience: PostgresSQL developers and administrators
Rating: 4.5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

While this book describes itself as a cookbook, the recipes in it work through the necessary skills and knowledge to administer PostgresSQL 14.

The recipes start from the basics of what makes PostgresSQL different, how to connect, enable access, and use the PostgresSQL tools - pgAdmin, OmniDB and psql. In each topic, there's a description of what problem or task you're trying to solve or complete, followed by a 'how to do it' section.

 

Chapter 2 moves on to exploring the database, with recipes for finding out what the server version is, how to find files, the message log, how much disk space a database uses, and table information such as table size and number of rows.

Chapters 3 and 4 cover server configuration and control, from working with the parameter file through to starting and stopping the server, restricting users, setting up multiple schemas and setting up a connection pool.

Tables and data is looked at next, with recipes on topics such as finding duplicate rows, maintaining column definitions, and loading data from various sources. Security is the topic of the next chapter, mainly in terms of user access, superusers, integrating with LDAP and connecting using SSL.

By Chapter 7, on database administration, the recipes are becoming more recognizably recipes, including how to write a script that performs actions on multiple tables, adding and removing schemas and moving objects between schemas.

A look at monitoring and diagnosis comes next, with recipes that can check what a user is running, who is using a specific table, and why queries might be slowing. This is followed by a set of 'regular maintenance' recipes that can remove old prepared transactions, find bloated tables and indexes, and handle unused indexes.

From here onwards the book moves on to more advanced topics, starting with performance and concurrency. Recipes look at how to find slow SQL statements, how to simplify complex SQL and make queries run faster without rewriting them. There are some interesting ideas covered, and if they happen to be applicable they'll be really useful.

A chapter on backup and recovery has a lot of useful scripts, and the book completes with a chapter on replication and upgrades.

This is a useful book, and the cookbook format works better than I'd imagined as a way of learning about PostgresSQL. There are some useful recipes, and the authors explain the topics clearly. Recommended.

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