Preface

Welcome to PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook! As a database, PostgreSQL is beginning to take its place in the world of high transaction rates and very large data installations. With this comes an increasing demand for PostgreSQL to act as a critical piece of infrastructure. System outages in these environments can be spectacularly costly and demand a higher caliber of management and tooling.

It is the job of a DBA to ensure that the database is always available for application demands and clients' needs. Yet, this is extremely difficult to accomplish without the necessary skills and experience with a common operating system and PostgreSQL tools. Installing, configuring, and optimizing a PostgreSQL cluster is a tiny fraction of the process. We also need to know how to find and recognize problems, manage a swarm of logical and physical replicas, and scale to increasing demands, all while preventing or mitigating system outages.

This book is something the author wishes existed 10 years ago. Back then, there were no recipes to follow to build a fault-tolerant PostgreSQL cluster; we had to improvise. It is our aim to prevent other DBAs from experiencing the kind of frustration borne from reinventing the wheel. We've done all the hard work, taken notes, outlined everything we've ever learned about keeping PostgreSQL available and written it all down in here.

We hope you find this book useful and relevant; it is the product of years of trial, error, testing, and a large amount of input from the PostgreSQL community.