PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook

A comprehensive guide to understanding key techniques for architecture and hardware planning, monitoring, replication, backups, and decoupling

Key Features

• Newly updated edition, covering the latest PostgreSQL 12 features with hands-on industry-driven recipes
• Create a PostgreSQL cluster that stays online even when disaster strikes
• Learn how to avoid costly downtime and data loss that can ruin your business

Book Description

Databases are nothing without the data they store. In the event of an outage or technical catastrophe, immediate recovery is essential. This updated edition ensures that you will learn the important concepts related to node architecture design, as well as techniques such as using repmgr for failover automation. From cluster layout and hardware selection to software stacks and horizontal scalability, this PostgreSQL cookbook will help you build a PostgreSQL cluster that will survive crashes, resist data corruption, and grow smoothly with customer demand.

You'll start by understanding how to plan a PostgreSQL database architecture that is resistant to outages and scalable, as it is the scaffolding on which everything rests. With the bedrock established, you'll cover the topics that PostgreSQL database administrators need to know to manage a highly available cluster. This includes configuration, troubleshooting, monitoring and alerting, backups through proxies, failover automation, and other considerations that are essential for a healthy PostgreSQL cluster. Later, you'll learn to use multi-master replication to maximize server availability. Later chapters will guide you through managing major version upgrades without downtime.

By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build an efficient and adaptive PostgreSQL 12 database cluster.

What you will learn

• Understand how to protect data with PostgreSQL replication tools
• Focus on hardware planning to ensure that your database runs efficiently
• Reduce database resource contention with connection pooling
• Monitor and visualize cluster activity with Nagios and the TIG (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) stack
• Construct a robust software stack that can detect and avert outages
• Use multi-master to achieve an enduring PostgreSQL cluster

Who this book is for

This book is for Postgres administrators and developers who are looking to build and maintain a highly reliable PostgreSQL cluster. Although knowledge of the new features of PostgreSQL 12 is not required, a basic understanding of PostgreSQL administration is expected.

Table of Contents

1. Architectural Considerations
2. Hardware Planning
3. Minimizing Downtime
4. Proxy and Pooling Resources
5. Troubleshooting
6. Monitoring
7. PostgreSQL Replication
8. Backup Management
9. High Availability with repmgr
10. High Availability with Patroni
11. Low-Level Server Mirroring
12. High Availability via Pacemaker
13. High Availability with Multi-Master Replication
14. Data Distribution
15. Zero-downtime Upgrades

Shaun Thomas has been experimenting with PostgreSQL since late 2000 and serves as a database consultant, teacher, blogger, and support engineer with 2ndQuadrant. He has presented at conferences such as Postgres Open, 2Q PGCONF, and PgConf on topics such as handling extreme throughput, high availability, failover techniques, monitoring tools, database architecture, multi-master conflict avoidance, and high availability upgrade concepts. He believes in a multi-disciplinary approach when it comes to high availability.

He believes that PostgreSQL has a stupendous future ahead, and he can't wait to see the advancements subsequent versions will bring.