PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

by Shaun M. Thomas

Over 100 recipes to design and implement a highly available server with the advanced features of PostgreSQLAbout This BookCreate a PostgreSQL cluster that stays online even when disaster strikesAvoid costly downtime and data loss that can ruin your businessPerform data replication and monitor your data with hands-on industry-driven recipes and detailed step-by-step explanationsWho This Book Is ForIf 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 LearnProtect your data with PostgreSQL replication and management tools such as Slony, Bucardo, and LondisteChoose the correct hardware for redundancy and scalePrepare for catastrophes and prevent them before they happenReduce database resource contention with connection poolingAutomate monitoring and alerts to visualize cluster activity using Nagios and collectdConstruct a robust software stack that can detect and fix outagesDesign a scalable schema architecture to handle billions of queriesIn DetailPostgreSQL, 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.

401 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 17, 2014

About the author

Shaun was born in 1977 in Olympia, WA with a major congenital heart defect. Until his corrective surgery in 1984, he could partake in very little physical activity due to lack of oxygen. This set the stage for him to become an avid reader.

After a short obsession with Forgotten Realms, Stephen King, and Melanie Rawn, he started writing a trilogy in 1994 that was unfortunately shelved due to the academic demands of the I.B. Program, later continuing with those of a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science at Cornell College. It's possible he'll revise the old notes and storyline and complete the series, but his new Phase Cycle currently demands most of his attention. The first book in this series, Rabbit Rue, first appeared on Shaun's publishing site, and was later published by Smashwords for offline reading as an eBook.

Shaun currently lives in the Chicago area with his wife Jennifer, who plans to start Ph.D. work in elementary music education in 2011.