Useful Tools and Extensions

This chapter is to be considered an appendix to the book. In this chapter, we will talk about some tools and extensions that allow a Database Administrator (DBA) to maximize the efficiency of their work by minimizing the effort needed to complete it.

We will talk about these extensions:

• pg_trgm
• Foreign data wrappers and the postgres_fdw extension

These are two of the official extensions for PostgreSQL. A site that can be very useful for finding extensions available for PostgreSQL is https://pgxn.org/.

In addition to extensions, we will also talk about other useful tools for the PostgreSQL DBA. There are dozens of tools available for PostgreSQL, but in this chapter, we will talk about:

• pgbackrest: a powerful tool useful to manage disaster recovery and point-in-time recovery (PITR)
• pgloader: a useful tool to easily migrate from MySQL, SQLite, and MS SQL to PostgreSQL; in this section, we will show an example...