Chapter 9. The PostgreSQL System Catalog and System Administration Functions
The PostgreSQL system catalog and system administration functions can aid both developers and administrators to keep the database clean and performant. System catalogs can be used to automate several tasks, such as finding tables without indexes, finding dependencies between database objects, and extracting information about the database through health checks, such as table bloats, database size, locks, and so on. Information extracted from the system catalog can be employed in monitoring solutions such as Nagios and in dynamic SQL. This chapter will be formatted a little bit differently and follow a cookbook approach.