Summary

One of the advantages of an open source community like the one surrounding PostgreSQL is that it's easy to see what other people struggle with. Watch enough of that, and some trouble spots that aren't too difficult to avoid become obvious. Some of the biggest problems people run into are quite fundamental to PostgreSQL: getting VACUUM to work properly, making sure your application acquires locks properly—there's a long list of major things you need to get right. But sometimes the little details can trip you up, instead. The tips covered in this chapter, from bulk loading to profiling might provide the right background information to make your use of the database simpler when dealing with smaller problems, too. And sometimes the answer to your problem is solved simply by using a newer version of PostgreSQL, where it's been engineered out of the...