Over 100 recipes to design and implement a highly available server with the advanced features of PostgreSQLAbout This Book
- Create a PostgreSQL cluster that stays online even when disaster strikes
- Avoid costly downtime and data loss that can ruin your business
- Perform data replication and monitor your data with hands-on industry-driven recipes and detailed step-by-step explanations
Who This Book Is For
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.
What You Will Learn
- Protect your data with PostgreSQL replication and management tools such as Slony, Bucardo, and Londiste
- Choose the correct hardware for redundancy and scale
- Prepare for catastrophes and prevent them before they happen
- Reduce database resource contention with connection pooling
- Automate monitoring and alerts to visualize cluster activity using Nagios and collectd
- Construct a robust software stack that can detect and fix outages
- Design a scalable schema architecture to handle billions of queries
In Detail
PostgreSQL, often known as simply "Postgres", is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) with an emphasis on extensibility and standards-compliance.
From hardware selection to software stacks and horizontal scalability, this book will help you build a versatile PostgreSQL cluster that will survive crashes, resist data corruption, and grow smoothly with customer demand. We start with selecting the necessary hardware to handle multiple failure scenarios with redundancy. Then, we discuss how to automate and visualize these checks with Nagios, check_mk, and Graphite. We'll finally round off by tackling the complex problem of data scalability.
Shaun M. Thomas
Shaun M. Thomas has been working with PostgreSQL since late 2000. He is a frequent contributor to the PostgreSQL Performance and General mailing lists, assisting other DBAs with the knowledge he's gained over the years. In 2011 and 2012, he gave presentations at the Postgres Open conference on topics such as handling extreme throughput, high availability, server redundancy, and failover techniques. Most recently, he has contributed the Shard Manager extension and the walctl WAL management suite. Currently, he serves as the database architect at OptionsHouse, an online options brokerage with a PostgreSQL cluster that handles almost 2 billion queries per day. Many of the techniques used in this book were developed specifically for this extreme environment. He believes that PostgreSQL has a stupendous future ahead, and he can't wait to see the advancements subsequent versions will bring.
