Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Save more on your purchases now! discount-offer-chevron-icon
Savings automatically calculated. No voucher code required.
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook
PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook: Over 100 recipes to design and implement a highly available server with the advanced features of PostgreSQL.

eBook
$19.99 $28.99
Paperback
$48.99
Subscription
Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m

What do you get with Print?

Product feature icon Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped
Product feature icon Paperback book shipped to your preferred address
Product feature icon Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats
Product feature icon Access this title in our online reader with advanced features
Product feature icon DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
OR
Modal Close icon
Payment Processing...
tick Completed

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Shipping Methods
Table of content icon View table of contents Preview book icon Preview Book

PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

Chapter 2. Handling and Avoiding Downtime

In this chapter, we will learn how we should react when outages inevitably occur and how to prepare ourselves for them. We will cover the following recipes in this chapter:

  • Determining acceptable losses
  • Configuration – getting it right the first time
  • Configuration – managing scary settings
  • Identifying important tables
  • Defusing cache poisoning
  • Exploring the magic of virtual IPs
  • Terminating rogue connections
  • Reducing contention with concurrent indexes
  • Managing system migrations
  • Managing software upgrades
  • Mitigating the impact of hardware failure
  • Applying bonus kernel tweaks

Introduction

Every piece of software has bugs. All hardware eventually fails or becomes obsolete. No environment is perfect. As a consequence, even a perfectly healthy database will require downtime periodically. How do we reconcile this need with client expectations, which imply that data is always available, no matter the circumstances?

As users ourselves, we know the frustration associated with attempting to use an application or website that isn't responding. Maybe the only impediment is a message indicating maintenance. No matter the cause, we have to remember to come back later and hope everything is working normally by then. Even with our knowledge about the complexity of software and databases, it is sometimes difficult to ignore an error message that prevents us from managing a bank account or making an online purchase.

Every day, users will be less understanding. Business owners and investors who may be losing millions in potential sales and liabilities while a system is unavailable...

Determining acceptable losses

We know that the PostgreSQL database will be offline at some point in the future. Maybe we need an upgrade to remove a critical security vulnerability or address a potential data corruption issue. Perhaps a RAM module is producing errors and needs immediate replacement. Maybe the primary data center was struck by lightning.

No matter the reason, we need to make decisions quickly. A helpful way is to ensure that the decision-making process is basing the answers on what the user expects for various levels of liability and on the context of the user. The QA department will not require the same response level as 10,000 shoppers who can't make a holiday purchase during a critical sale.

System outage and response escalation expectations are generally codified in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). How long should the maintenance last? How often should planned outages occur? When should users be informed and to what extent? Who is included in the set of potential...

Configuration – getting it right the first time

An important aspect of setting up a highly available database is starting with a stable configuration that will not require a lot of future modifications. Even settings that can be changed during database operation can drastically alter its performance profile and behavior. Other settings may require a full database restart, which can lead to a short outage, depending on how resilient the frontend application is.

We want to avoid introducing instability into our PostgreSQL database from the very beginning. To that end, we are going to explore common (and perhaps, uncommon) configuration options to use in a highly available installation.

Getting ready

The PostgreSQL documentation describes all of the settings we will be discussing. We recommend that you visit the PostgreSQL.org website and read the documentation regarding server configuration. There's probably too much to absorb before continuing with this section, but we recommend...

Configuration – managing scary settings

When it comes to highly available database servers and configuration, a very important aspect is whether or not a changed setting requires a database restart before taking effect. While it is true that many of these are important enough and they should be set correctly before starting the server, our requirements evolve sometimes.

If or when this happens, there is no alternative but to restart the PostgreSQL service. There are, of course, steps we can take to avoid this fate. Perhaps, an existing server didn't need the WAL output to be compatible with hot standby servers. Maybe, we need to move the logfile, enable WAL archival, or increase the amount of connections.

These are all scenarios that require us to restart PostgreSQL. We can avoid this by identifying these settings early and paying special attention to them.

Getting ready

PostgreSQL has a lot of useful views for DBAs to get information about the database and its current state. For...

Identifying important tables

Another aspect of maintaining a highly available database is to know all important information about the contents of the database itself. In this case, we aim to focus on tables and indexes that receive the most activity. If any problems that might require maintenance or a restart arise, the most active portions are the likely origin.

What is activity? Inserts, updates, deletes, and selects are a good start. PostgreSQL collects statistics on all of this information, making it easy to collect and track. It also tracks how often indexes or tables are scanned and how many rows were affected by each. In addition, we can find out how much disk space any object consumes, and given the help of a couple contributed tools, we can also find out how much of this space is currently reusable.

Data like this tells us which tables and indexes are the most active, which objects have the highest row turnover, and which objects require a high disk I/O. Armed with these statistics...

Defusing cache poisoning

Not every DBA has experienced disk cache poisoning. Those who have recognize it as a bane to any critical OLTP system and a source of constant stress in a highly available environment.

When the operating system fetches disk blocks into memory, it also applies arbitrary aging, promotion, and purging heuristics. Several of these can invalidate cached data in the presence of an originating process change such as a database crash or restart. Any memory stored by PostgreSQL in shared memory is also purged upon database shutdown.

Perhaps the worst thing a DBA can do following a database crash or a restart is to immediately make the database available to applications and users. Unless storage is based on SSD or a very capable SAN, random read performance will drop by two or three orders of magnitude as data is being supplied by slow disks instead of by memory. As a result, all subsequent queries will greatly over-saturate the available disk bandwidth. This delays query results...

Introduction


Every piece of software has bugs. All hardware eventually fails or becomes obsolete. No environment is perfect. As a consequence, even a perfectly healthy database will require downtime periodically. How do we reconcile this need with client expectations, which imply that data is always available, no matter the circumstances?

As users ourselves, we know the frustration associated with attempting to use an application or website that isn't responding. Maybe the only impediment is a message indicating maintenance. No matter the cause, we have to remember to come back later and hope everything is working normally by then. Even with our knowledge about the complexity of software and databases, it is sometimes difficult to ignore an error message that prevents us from managing a bank account or making an online purchase.

Every day, users will be less understanding. Business owners and investors who may be losing millions in potential sales and liabilities while a system is unavailable...

Determining acceptable losses


We know that the PostgreSQL database will be offline at some point in the future. Maybe we need an upgrade to remove a critical security vulnerability or address a potential data corruption issue. Perhaps a RAM module is producing errors and needs immediate replacement. Maybe the primary data center was struck by lightning.

No matter the reason, we need to make decisions quickly. A helpful way is to ensure that the decision-making process is basing the answers on what the user expects for various levels of liability and on the context of the user. The QA department will not require the same response level as 10,000 shoppers who can't make a holiday purchase during a critical sale.

System outage and response escalation expectations are generally codified in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). How long should the maintenance last? How often should planned outages occur? When should users be informed and to what extent? Who is included in the set of potential database...

Configuration – getting it right the first time


An important aspect of setting up a highly available database is starting with a stable configuration that will not require a lot of future modifications. Even settings that can be changed during database operation can drastically alter its performance profile and behavior. Other settings may require a full database restart, which can lead to a short outage, depending on how resilient the frontend application is.

We want to avoid introducing instability into our PostgreSQL database from the very beginning. To that end, we are going to explore common (and perhaps, uncommon) configuration options to use in a highly available installation.

Getting ready

The PostgreSQL documentation describes all of the settings we will be discussing. We recommend that you visit the PostgreSQL.org website and read the documentation regarding server configuration. There's probably too much to absorb before continuing with this section, but we recommend that you familiarize...

Configuration – managing scary settings


When it comes to highly available database servers and configuration, a very important aspect is whether or not a changed setting requires a database restart before taking effect. While it is true that many of these are important enough and they should be set correctly before starting the server, our requirements evolve sometimes.

If or when this happens, there is no alternative but to restart the PostgreSQL service. There are, of course, steps we can take to avoid this fate. Perhaps, an existing server didn't need the WAL output to be compatible with hot standby servers. Maybe, we need to move the logfile, enable WAL archival, or increase the amount of connections.

These are all scenarios that require us to restart PostgreSQL. We can avoid this by identifying these settings early and paying special attention to them.

Getting ready

PostgreSQL has a lot of useful views for DBAs to get information about the database and its current state. For this section...

Identifying important tables


Another aspect of maintaining a highly available database is to know all important information about the contents of the database itself. In this case, we aim to focus on tables and indexes that receive the most activity. If any problems that might require maintenance or a restart arise, the most active portions are the likely origin.

What is activity? Inserts, updates, deletes, and selects are a good start. PostgreSQL collects statistics on all of this information, making it easy to collect and track. It also tracks how often indexes or tables are scanned and how many rows were affected by each. In addition, we can find out how much disk space any object consumes, and given the help of a couple contributed tools, we can also find out how much of this space is currently reusable.

Data like this tells us which tables and indexes are the most active, which objects have the highest row turnover, and which objects require a high disk I/O. Armed with these statistics...

Defusing cache poisoning


Not every DBA has experienced disk cache poisoning. Those who have recognize it as a bane to any critical OLTP system and a source of constant stress in a highly available environment.

When the operating system fetches disk blocks into memory, it also applies arbitrary aging, promotion, and purging heuristics. Several of these can invalidate cached data in the presence of an originating process change such as a database crash or restart. Any memory stored by PostgreSQL in shared memory is also purged upon database shutdown.

Perhaps the worst thing a DBA can do following a database crash or a restart is to immediately make the database available to applications and users. Unless storage is based on SSD or a very capable SAN, random read performance will drop by two or three orders of magnitude as data is being supplied by slow disks instead of by memory. As a result, all subsequent queries will greatly over-saturate the available disk bandwidth. This delays query results...

Exploring the magic of virtual IPs


As we're running a highly available database, we have at least one standby copy available at all times, right? Of course we do. However, after promoting a standby copy to act as a primary, we need to redirect traffic to the new server. How can we do this easily?

One common method is to use a database connection pool. The pool acts as a connection proxy and simply needs each known node to be registered so that it can redirect connections to the proper primary database server. We will eventually discuss this approach, but there's actually a simpler tool available to us that requires no additional software.

Another method is to change DNS to redirect network connections to the new server. The beauty of this technique is that it masquerades the entire access path to the server so that services other than PostgreSQL can access the new server as well. Unfortunately, subdomains are tied to a single IP address. As DBAs, we probably don't have access to most of the...

Left arrow icon Right arrow icon
Download code icon Download Code

Description

A comprehensive series of dependable recipes to design, build, and implement a PostgreSQL server architecture free of common pitfalls that can operate for years to come. Each chapter is packed with instructions and examples to simplify even highly complex database operations. If you are a PostgreSQL DBA working on Linux systems who want a database that never gives up, this book is for you. If you've ever experienced a database outage, restored from a backup, spent hours trying to repair a malfunctioning cluster, or simply want to guarantee system stability, this book is definitely for you.

What you will learn

  • Protect your data with PostgreSQL replication and management tools such as Slony, Bucardo, and Londiste
  • Choose the correct hardware for redundancy and scale
  • Prepare for catastrophes and prevent them before they happen
  • Reduce database resource contention with connection pooling
  • Automate monitoring and alerts to visualize cluster activity using Nagios and collectd
  • Construct a robust software stack that can detect and fix outages
  • Design a scalable schema architecture to handle billions of queries
Estimated delivery fee Deliver to Russia

Economy delivery 10 - 13 business days

$6.95

Premium delivery 6 - 9 business days

$21.95
(Includes tracking information)

Product Details

Country selected
Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jul 17, 2014
Length: 398 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849516969
Vendor :
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Category :
Tools :

What do you get with Print?

Product feature icon Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped
Product feature icon Paperback book shipped to your preferred address
Product feature icon Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats
Product feature icon Access this title in our online reader with advanced features
Product feature icon DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
OR
Modal Close icon
Payment Processing...
tick Completed

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Shipping Methods
Estimated delivery fee Deliver to Russia

Economy delivery 10 - 13 business days

$6.95

Premium delivery 6 - 9 business days

$21.95
(Includes tracking information)

Product Details

Publication date : Jul 17, 2014
Length: 398 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849516969
Vendor :
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Category :
Tools :

Packt Subscriptions

See our plans and pricing
Modal Close icon
$19.99 billed monthly
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Simple pricing, no contract
$199.99 billed annually
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just $5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts
$279.99 billed in 18 months
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just $5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts

Frequently bought together


Stars icon
Total $ 133.97
PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance
$54.99
PostgreSQL Administration Essentials
$29.99
PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook
$48.99
Total $ 133.97 Stars icon

Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Hardware Planning Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Handling and Avoiding Downtime Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Pooling Resources Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Troubleshooting Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Monitoring Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Replication Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Replication Management Tools Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Advanced Stack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Cluster Control Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Data Distribution Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Top Reviews
Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.7
(6 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 33.3%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Filter icon Filter
Top Reviews

Filter reviews by




Denver Water - Dawson Mar 04, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Wonderful published book. Great vendor!!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
skemppin Aug 21, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Several good guidelines for designing PostgreSQL databases and HA Clusters.For example recipes for counting storage size, IOPS, cpu, memory etc...Also very specific guides how to use different replications and their monitoring + management and HA solutions.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
loumarin Feb 09, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book exceeded my expectations, I am constantly reading and re-doing the recipes, it will be a good adquisition to anyone interested in Postgresql Big Leagues.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Emre Sevinç Aug 21, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook is a very well written book whose primary audience are experienced DBAs and system engineers who want to take their PostgreSQL skills to the next level by diving into the details of building highly available PostgreSQL based systems. Reading this book is like drinking from a fire hose, the signal-to-noise ratio is very high; in other words, every single page is packed with important, critical, and very practical information. As a consequence, this also means that the book is not for newbies: not only you have to know the fundamental aspects of PostgreSQL from a database administrator’s point of view, but you also need to have solid GNU/Linux system administration background.One of the strongest aspects of the book is the author’s principled and well-structured engineering approach to building a highly available PostgreSQL system. Instead of jumping to some recipes to be memorized, the book teaches you basic but very important principles of capacity planning. More importantly, this planning of servers and networking is not only given as a good template, but the author also explains the logic behind it, as well as drawing attention to the reason behind the heuristics he use and why some magic numbers are taken as a good estimate in case of lack of more case-specific information. This style is applied very consistently throughout the book, each recipe is explained so that you know why you do something in addition to how you do it.After the first chapter on basic planning, the author jumps to a set of miscellaneous topics in the Chapter 2, and details some important tricks such as defusing cache poisoning, concurrent indexes, and Linux kernel tweaks. This chapter starts to reveal another valuable aspect of the book: the information regarding an open source RDBMS such as PostgreSQL is freely available on the Internet, but depending on your needs, a particular set of information can very well be scattered over a lot of e-mail list messages, forum posts, Wiki pages, etc., and it takes a disciplined mind with a lot of field experience to put all of that scattered information into a single, consistent, logical and easy to follow form.Starting from Chapter 3, each chapter explores a single topic in a lot of practical detail, starting with connection pooling. This chapter, as well as almost all of the remaining ones has a nice feature: the author always try to explain alternative solutions, describes their advantages and disadvantages, and where possible shows how to combine some alternatives to get best of each.Chapters 4 and 5, namely Troubleshooting and Monitoring can be thought as a single chapter, because it is difficult to think these fundamental concepts separately. These chapters are also not only valuable for PostgreSQL DBAs but for any DBA or any GNU/Linux system administrator in general. Troubleshooting and monitoring a highly available database requires a book by itself, but since this book’s scope is clearly defined, the author provides enough background and practical starting points in about 70 pages.I can easily say that Chapter 6: Replication, together with Chapter 7: Replication Management Tools starts to form the ‘meat’ of the book; without successfully implementing and practically managing the replication of your critical database servers, it is impossible to think about building a highly available system, in other words, you need at least one replica of your database system, so that if your primary system goes down, you can very easily switch to your replica (or offload some of your less criticial applications to your replica and relive the stress on your primary system). These two chapters presents you the solid and practical information to achieve that goal. Similar to the previous chapters, the author shows and explains many useful and practical tools, he also does not refrain from presenting an open source tool, walctl, that he developed to as a “PostgreSQL WAL management system that pushes or pulls WAL files from a remote central storage server”. I consider another positive point for the book because it clearly indicates the serious time investment of the author for PostgreSQL and its high availability configuration.Chapter 8: Advanced Stack, is aptly named, because this chapter, together with Chapter 9: Cluster Control, forms the most advanced and complex part of the book. The author’s warnings regarding the information density, and related real-life complexity of the topics explained in these two chapters should not be taken lightly. Indeed, there are many combinations of events that can lead to subtle and hard to debug errors in case of clusters set up to take over from failing nodes. Creating such a highly available system with Linux based tools such LVM, XFS, DRBD, Pacemaker, and Corosync requires careful planning, probably experimenting in a safe virtual environment, and then a disciplined execution, as well as monitoring. Again, these chapters alone include topics that can take a volume, and a detailed training by themselves, and I think the author kept a good balance between depth and breadth.Final chapter, Data Distribution, can be considered as a bonus chapter that briefly shows setting up a PostgreSQL server, dealing with foreign tables, managing shards, creating a scalable nextval replacement, and relevant tips and tricks.There are not many negative sides to this very dense PostgreSQL book. A few minor points that deserves mention are its focus on the most popular Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Debian and their derivatives (FreeBSD and other BSD admins will require slightly more effort), some obsolete networking command usage such as ifconfig instead of ip (but then again, this might be helpful for FreeBSD admins), and inconsistent use of command outputs (sometimes no output is shown, whereas for some commands screen-shots or textual outputs are used inconsistently). One might also argue for a slight reordering of chapters for pedagogical concerns, but then again this is highly open to debate and one’s particular preferences when it comes to system and database administration.I can recommend PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook without hesitation to PostgreSQL DBAs who want to push their skill to the next level, and learn the fundamentals of building highly available PostgreSQL based database clusters. It certainly will not be as easy as reading a book, but it is good to know such a book exists as a very good guide.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Igor A. Polishchuk Aug 22, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
As it happens with fiction literature, I did not quiet like this book from the very beginning, but it became interesting after the first chapter. So, if you read it cover to cover, get some patience.In the beginning, the author admits that he does not cover cloud specific Postgres high availability methods. Well, it leaves an opportunity for somebody else to write a book dedicated to Postgres in a cloud. Also, the subject of high availability is huge and cannot be fully covered in a limited format of a cookbook. Anyway, the majority of the book's material is relevant in a cloud environment, too.The whole first chapter "Hardware Planning", perhaps, may have some value for a new to the subject users, but only to get basic ideas. Some recipes in this chapter are obvious, very basic, or oversimplified. Just one example, “Having enough IOPS” (p.11) is oversimplified in its relying on arbitrary assumptions. It is not clear why the author assumes that 3.5" hard drives produce 500 IOPS and 2.5” drives 350 IOPS (page 12). And don’t believe that you can get 500 IPOS from a 15K RPM drive. Even storage vendors usually claim no more than 180 IOPS. We are talking about random IOPS here, right? It does not make sense to plan a system for perfectly sequential IOs. I could continue complaining about the first chapter. Towards the end of it I was seriously thinking about putting the book away.My patience was fully rewarded in the consecutive chapters.As a cookbook should, it provides a bunch of handy queries. An example of a recipe with handy queries is “Identifying important tables” on page 53. There are also many very useful techniques like “Defusing cache poisoning” (how to avoid database slowness caused by empty caches after a crash), “Exploring the magic of virtual IPs” (how to switch to a standby server without using additional software), “Terminating rogue connections” (how to kill connection which does not want to die). These are just a few examples out of many.The author recommends and explains multiple handy Postgresql extensions and Linux tools throughout the book. dstat, iotop, and iostat are just a few out of really many. Hopefully, the readers already know how to use iostat or sar, but some other recommended tools are less known. Honestly, some tricks were new for me. In the end, I felt satisfied with the book. This book may teach new users many useful technics, tools, and queries. It also not just provides recipes, but in most cases provides good insights on how the things work. Experienced users may just use it as a source of readily available queries and commands and save time on producing their own. I would totally recommend this book to anybody who needs to maintain Postgresql databases.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Get free access to Packt library with over 7500+ books and video courses for 7 days!
Start Free Trial

FAQs

What is the delivery time and cost of print book? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela
What is custom duty/charge? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customs duty are charges levied on goods when they cross international borders. It is a tax that is imposed on imported goods. These duties are charged by special authorities and bodies created by local governments and are meant to protect local industries, economies, and businesses.

Do I have to pay customs charges for the print book order? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

The orders shipped to the countries that are listed under EU27 will not bear custom charges. They are paid by Packt as part of the order.

List of EU27 countries: www.gov.uk/eu-eea:

A custom duty or localized taxes may be applicable on the shipment and would be charged by the recipient country outside of the EU27 which should be paid by the customer and these duties are not included in the shipping charges been charged on the order.

How do I know my custom duty charges? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

The amount of duty payable varies greatly depending on the imported goods, the country of origin and several other factors like the total invoice amount or dimensions like weight, and other such criteria applicable in your country.

For example:

  • If you live in Mexico, and the declared value of your ordered items is over $ 50, for you to receive a package, you will have to pay additional import tax of 19% which will be $ 9.50 to the courier service.
  • Whereas if you live in Turkey, and the declared value of your ordered items is over € 22, for you to receive a package, you will have to pay additional import tax of 18% which will be € 3.96 to the courier service.
How can I cancel my order? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Cancellation Policy for Published Printed Books:

You can cancel any order within 1 hour of placing the order. Simply contact customercare@packt.com with your order details or payment transaction id. If your order has already started the shipment process, we will do our best to stop it. However, if it is already on the way to you then when you receive it, you can contact us at customercare@packt.com using the returns and refund process.

Please understand that Packt Publishing cannot provide refunds or cancel any order except for the cases described in our Return Policy (i.e. Packt Publishing agrees to replace your printed book because it arrives damaged or material defect in book), Packt Publishing will not accept returns.

What is your returns and refunds policy? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Return Policy:

We want you to be happy with your purchase from Packtpub.com. We will not hassle you with returning print books to us. If the print book you receive from us is incorrect, damaged, doesn't work or is unacceptably late, please contact Customer Relations Team on customercare@packt.com with the order number and issue details as explained below:

  1. If you ordered (eBook, Video or Print Book) incorrectly or accidentally, please contact Customer Relations Team on customercare@packt.com within one hour of placing the order and we will replace/refund you the item cost.
  2. Sadly, if your eBook or Video file is faulty or a fault occurs during the eBook or Video being made available to you, i.e. during download then you should contact Customer Relations Team within 14 days of purchase on customercare@packt.com who will be able to resolve this issue for you.
  3. You will have a choice of replacement or refund of the problem items.(damaged, defective or incorrect)
  4. Once Customer Care Team confirms that you will be refunded, you should receive the refund within 10 to 12 working days.
  5. If you are only requesting a refund of one book from a multiple order, then we will refund you the appropriate single item.
  6. Where the items were shipped under a free shipping offer, there will be no shipping costs to refund.

On the off chance your printed book arrives damaged, with book material defect, contact our Customer Relation Team on customercare@packt.com within 14 days of receipt of the book with appropriate evidence of damage and we will work with you to secure a replacement copy, if necessary. Please note that each printed book you order from us is individually made by Packt's professional book-printing partner which is on a print-on-demand basis.

What tax is charged? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Currently, no tax is charged on the purchase of any print book (subject to change based on the laws and regulations). A localized VAT fee is charged only to our European and UK customers on eBooks, Video and subscriptions that they buy. GST is charged to Indian customers for eBooks and video purchases.

What payment methods can I use? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

You can pay with the following card types:

  1. Visa Debit
  2. Visa Credit
  3. MasterCard
  4. PayPal
What is the delivery time and cost of print books? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela