PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook: Solve Real-world Postgresql Problems With over 100 Simple, Yet Incredibly Effective Recipes Paperback – January 31, 2010

This book does exactly what it advertises -- it tells you what to do and NOT to do if you want your PG application to fly.I've read the pgsql-performance mailing list from Jan 2011 to now (Sep 5th), and you can find a lot of the stuff covered in the book, but it's not nearly as well organized. Save yourself the time and get more info by getting the book.

It's a very good guide to start working with Postgres. Just meet its subtittle: "Quick answer to common problems". Its easy to read it and include a lot of examples.

If you're familiar with any other DB (for instance MySQL) and you want to move to PostgreSQL than this book is simply the best.

I very much dislike this book. I started with the Regular Maintenance section. The grammar is atrocious. The explanations leave me scratching my head wondering what the author means. There is one recipe for avoiding freezing of the transaction id. Why would you want to avoid it? It is necessary.Every recipe I read in that chapter was poorly explained. I won't read anymore, it's too aggravating.I was not paid to review the book, nor did I receive a free copy, unfortunately, what a waste of money.

Disclaimer/note: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher, in pdf format.The PostgreSQL community has been waiting for a "cookbook", and I'm really excited that we finally have one. The PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook contains many tips & techniques I'm going to put to immediate use. Like, pgloader and the ON_ERROR_STOP option to psql. This book also reminded me that there's still a lot I don't know about Postgres: for example, I've never worked with pg_controldata or the quote_ident() function. If you're a Pg admin (or wannabe), you should give this book at least a run-through, even if you think you already know everything.Most of the "recipes" in this cookbook will stand on their own; some require material from previous or other referenced sections to make sense. I am a sucker for conversational style, and while the book gets off to a rough start, it does even out after a bit. Big blocks of SQL are formatted consistently in a style that, while it's not one I use myself, is easy to read.The authors give a great explanation of why they prefer their filesystem set up a specific way, and how to do it (of course, it probably helps that I agree with them on this point); and good advice about schema & relation names. Specific problem-solving tools I found useful are: the list of steps to troubleshoot failed connections; specific things to do if a backend is hung, or a query is taking too long; and generating test data and taking random samples of real-world data. They also give warnings where something you do might cause application downtime.Sadly, this book suffers from inadequate editing, dragging the rating down from a solid four stars. I often struggled against the grammar and organization to understand what the authors were trying to express. This frustrated me and slowed me down; a detriment in a technical manual. I also found that I couldn't rely on the (seemingly auto-generated) index to find what I need, although the TOC and chapter headings helped out a lot there.Bottom line: would I buy a hard copy? At the listed pricepoint (US$45 at this time), probably not. However, it's a great first effort and I eagerly await the second edition.

I've been reading through the recently published book PostgreSQL 9.0 Admin Cookbook of late, and found that it satisfies an itch for me, at least for now. Every time I get involved in a new project, or work with a new group of people, there's a period of adjustment where I get introduced to new tools and new procedures. I enjoy seeing new (and not uncommonly, better) ways of doing the things I do regularly. At conferences I'll often spend time playing "What's on your desktop" with people I meet, to get an idea of how they do their work, and what methods they use. Questions about various peoples' favorite window manager, email reader, browser plugin, or IRC client are not uncommon. Sometimes I'm surprised by a utility or a technique I'd never known before, and sometimes it's nice just to see minor differences in the ways people do things, to expand my toolbox somewhat. This book did that for me.As the title suggests, authors Simon Riggs and Hannu Krosing have organized their book similarly to a cookbook, made up of simple "recipes" organized in subject groups. Each recipe covers a simple topic, such as "Connecting using SSL", "Adding/Removing tablespaces", and "Managing Hot Standby", with detail sufficient to guide a user from beginning to end. Of course in many of the more complex cases some amount of detail must be skipped, and in general this book probably won't provide its reader with an in depth education, but it will provide a framework to guide further research into a particular topic. It includes a description of the manuals, and locations of some of the mailing lists to get the researcher started.I've used PostgreSQL for many different projects and been involved in the community for several years, so I didn't find anything in the book that was completely unfamiliar. But PostgreSQL is an open source project with a large community. There exists a wide array of tools, many of which I've never had occasion to use. Reading about some of them, and seeing examples in print, was a pleasant and educational experience. For instance, one recipe describes "Selective replication using Londiste". My tool of choice for such problems is generally Bucardo, so I'd not been exposed to Londiste's way of doing things. Nor have I used pgstatspack, a project for collecting various statistics and metrics from database views which is discussed under "Collecting regular statistics from pg_stat_* views".In short, the book gave me the opportunity to look over the shoulder of experienced PostgreSQL users and administrators to see how they go about doing things, and compare to how I've done them. I'm glad to have had the opportunity.

great info and helpful understanding of how to get started with postgresql

A good read where I found some inside information I am currently using in my job

Gut strukturiert - kein Blabla sondern Fakten.Nichts für Anfänger!Ich würde mich freuen wenn es ein Buch in dieser Art für OS X Server gäbe das alle Fallen und Stolpersteine ausräumt. 3 Cluster auf einem Server und keine ausreichende Dokumentation und schon gar keine Anleitung .....

I am almost a beginner with PostgreSQL but have lots of experience with other databases. Some of the later topics are a bit advanced for me at the moment but all 'recipes' are clearly explained with good examples.

Il manuale per chi entra nel mondo PostgreSQL da un punto di vista sistemistico e dell'amministrazione di un server dedicato al RDBMS.

Very useful book for getting Postgresql set up.