PostgreSQL High Availability Cookbook

by Shaun M. Thomas

Databases are nothing without the data they store. In the event of a failure - catastrophic or otherwise - immediate recovery is essential. By carefully combining multiple servers, it’s even possible to hide the fact a failure occurred at all.

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. It all begins with hardware selection for the skeleton of an efficient PostgreSQL database cluster. Then it’s on to preventing downtime as well as troubleshooting some real life problems that administrators commonly face. Next, we add database monitoring to the stack, using collectd, Nagios, and Graphite. And no stack is complete without replication using multiple internal and external tools, including the newly released pglogical extension. Pacemaker or Raft consensus tools are the final piece to grant the cluster the ability to heal itself. We even round off by tackling the complex problem of data scalability.

This book exploits many new features introduced in PostgreSQL 9.6 to make the database more efficient and adaptive, and most importantly, keep it running.

ebook

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.