Book Review: PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

Book Review: PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

The open source database communities have been blessed the last several months with many books hitting the marketplace.  The PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook by Simon Riggs and Gianni Ciolli has been shown to be a proven resource.  Reference books are often overlooked as you can always find the information online and ‘RTFM’.  The ability to peruse a text often provides insights and examples that you are probably not going to find in the manual pages. And good reference books have many examples to guide you through the rough spots of a system in a way that a bulleted list of options on a manual page cannot.

This book is over five hundred and fifty pages long and starts with an introduction and installation guide before covering many subjects and finishing with replication.  There are over one hundred and seventy-five ‘recipes’  that will be handy to answer questions like ‘How many tables are in a schema?’ or ‘How do you remove a user without dropping their data?”.  Database administration (or Site Reliability Engineering) is made up of many complex functions and operations that require skill and knowledge. Picking up that skill and knowledge has a steep learning curve, and this book does an outstanding job with the areas that one needs to cover for a modern PostgreSQL server.

The book is divided into sections – First Steps, Exploring the Database, Server Configuration, Server Control, Tables and Data, Security, Database Administration, Monitoring and Diagnosis, Regular Maintenance, Performance and Concurrency, Backup and Recovery, and Replication and Recovery.  Each section is well-covered and there are numerous code examples.  I would not hesitate to hand this book to a DBA/SRE with experience in another relational database and ask them to administer a PostgreSQL server.

Anyone new to PostgreSQL will find this book useful and I highly recommend this book. The recipes and tips are very handy.  If you are a long-time user of PostgreSQL, you may find many sections interesting, such as creating a time series table with portioning.