Xaprb

I’ve been accepted to present at the brand-new and very exciting Postgres Open 2011 about system scaling, TCP traffic, and mathematical modeling. I’m really looking forward to it — it will be my first PostgreSQL conference in a couple of years! See you there.

PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook. By Simon Riggs and Hannu Krosing, Packt, 2010. Approximately 330 pages. (Link to publisher’s site.)

This is a good book for PostgreSQL database administrators to pick up, especially if you’re new to PostgreSQL but familiar with another system such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL. It has more than 80 “recipes” that range from quick tips to moderately detailed discussion of how to accomplish specific tasks. The chapters and recipes are well organized, and you can either read the book from start to finish or jump to a specific recipe for quick help.

The major topics are introductory/overview, configuration, managing tables and data, security, managing the server itself, monitoring, maintenance, performance, backup and recovery, replication, and upgrades. The chapter list mimics that list pretty well, though I lumped some chapters together in my topic list.

Some of the same topics are covered in much greater detail in Greg Smith’s excellent PostgreSQL 9 High Performance, which I reviewed previously.

On the negative side, I can only remark that the cookbook format in general isn’t my favorite; each “recipe” is quite formulaic, with little sub-headings titled “getting ready, how to do it, how it works, there’s more, see also.” But it works pretty well nonetheless as a quick-reference guide.

Overall worth picking up, unless you’re quite knowledgeable about PostgreSQL already, in which case I wouldn’t expect you to learn much from this book.

PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance. By Gregory Smith, Packt 2010. About 420 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s page for this book.)

I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to everyone who uses PostgreSQL or MySQL. MySQL users should benefit from understanding PostgreSQL. Beyond that, I learned a lot from this book that I can apply directly to MySQL. In particular, the book begins with a few chapters on hardware performance, benchmarking, and configuration. This material is database-agnostic and very well done. There is about 70 pages of it — it goes into a lot of details. It is more detailed than the similar material in my own book High Performance MySQL.

The rest of the book is much more focused on PostgreSQL. There are chapters on memory use, server configuration, maintenance (with a good survey of how PostgreSQL handles things like MVCC), benchmarking, indexing, query optimization, statistics, monitoring and trending, pooling, caching, replication, partitioning, proxies, and finally an extensive laundry list of common problems and how to solve them.

It was a pleasure to read — the quality and clarity of the writing is very good. Greg is an excellent writer and obviously put a lot of work into this book.