Call of Postgres: Advanced Operations

This tutorial is designed to unite numerous bits of information on how to configure Postgres, OS and hardware for optimal performance. We will look at different components and their settings. A distinct attention will be paid to methods for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues found in the OS and in PostgreSQL. Maintenance of Postgres on Linux is the main focus of the tutorial.

Handling Postgres is not easy. The task is further complicated by the fact that maintaining Postgres also means that you have to take care of the operating system and the hardware. These complicated systems that Postgres relies upon keep constantly evolving. In order to be universal, hardware and OS are set up to guarantee acceptable performance for any sort of workload by default, and this does not necessarily mean to be an optimal solution for running an RDBMS. Therefore, it is considered to be a best practice to recheck hardware, OS and PostgreSQL components' settings before introducing a database into a production environment. However, which of those need to be tuned exactly and how? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are scattered in pieces all over the hardware vendors' Web sites, OS maintainers' Wiki pages and various how-to's that could be found on the Internet.

This tutorial is designed to unite numerous bits of information on how to configure Postgres, OS and hardware for optimal performance. We will look at different components and their settings. A distinct attention will be paid to methods for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues found in the OS and in PostgreSQL. Maintenance of Postgres on Linux is the main focus of the tutorial.

Thus, the goal of the tutorial is to present a complete picture of how to maintain Postgres, locate sources of the problems and eliminate them.

The tutorial will be of most use to system and database administrators.