Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli
5 (1)
Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

5 (1)
By: Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli

Overview of this book

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 like 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-premise.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Writing a conditional psql script

psql supports the conditional \if\elif\else, and \endif meta-commands. In this recipe, we will demonstrate some of them.

Getting ready

We want to improve the vartest.sql script so that it runs VACUUM  if there are dead rows in that table.

How to do it…

We can add conditional commands to vartest.sql, resulting in the following script:

\set needs_vacuum false
SELECT schemaname
, relname
, n_dead_tup
, n_live_tup
, n_dead_tup > 0 AS needs_vacuum
FROM pg_stat_user_tables
ORDER BY n_dead_tup DESC
LIMIT 1
\gset
\if :needs_vacuum
\qecho Running VACUUM on table :"relname" in schema :"schemaname"
\qecho Rows before: :n_dead_tup dead, :n_live_tup live
VACUUM ANALYZE :schemaname.:relname;
\qecho Waiting 1 second...
SELECT pg_sleep(1);
SELECT n_dead_tup AS n_dead_tup_now
,      n_live_tup AS n_live_tup_now
FROM pg_stat_user_tables...