Improving the performance of logical backup/recovery

Performance is often a concern in any medium-sized or large database.

Backup performance is often a delicate issue because resource usage may need to be limited to remain within certain boundaries. There may also be a restriction on the maximum runtime for the backup – for example, a backup that runs every Sunday.

Again, restore performance may be more important than backup performance, even if backup is the more obvious concern.

In this recipe, we will discuss the performance of logical backup and recovery; the physical case is quite different and is examined in the next recipe.

Getting ready

If performance is a concern or is likely to be, then you should read the Planning backups recipe first.

How to do it…

You can use the -j option to specify the number of parallel processes that pg_dump should use to perform the database backup. This requires that you use the -F d option, which selects...