PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance

Excellent book. Very well written and pleasant to read. Provides a lot of details that help to actually understand what is going on in database. Every performance/optimization technique, configuration flag is explained in detail. First half of the book covers thinks like choosing hardware, processor, memory, disk, file system, RAID matrix ,etc. In spite of the fact that I am java programmer, not DB engineer I find this part interesting too; it is good to know how database does its job. Somewhat old (addresses postgreSQL 9.0 and older versions, we have 9.4 now), but I see no parts that are outdated. PostgreSQL have not changed that much (you may read release notes for 9.1-9.4) and basic principles (that are explained very well, in length and in great detail) are not to change anytime soon.

The chapter on query optimization alone was worth the price of the book. You need this book if you want to be a postgresql guru. Chock full of info from hardware benchmarking to server tuning.

This is an excellent book which summarizes all the ways of improving performance of the PostgreSQL database. I have more than 20 years of database experience, mostly Oracle, and almost as much Unix and Linux experience. Greg Smith showed a real out of the box thinking and explained the influence of things like the choice of file system to the database performance. An excellent book, a must have for a DBA and anybody interested in PostgreSQL.

If you're looking to do a green field development, or learn about writing PostgreSQL statements, then this is the wrong book. It's suited to production DBA's looking to tweak PostgreSQL. Slightly off subject, it's much more labour intensive to keep PostgreSQL happy and performant, than compared to Microsoft SQL server. So if you have one MS DBA on staff, you'll probably need 2 or 3 PostgreSQL DBA's. Just saying.

Well written and comprehensive, it clearly explains important under-the-hood principles. Useful for every good programmer using and configuring Postgresql. I recommend

I still have a lot more of this book to read before doing a reasonably complete review on it. That said, I was very disappointed to see that the section on WAL shipping basically said that external scripts are required to achieve it and so very little useful information on the topic was included in the book. While the author openly states that he is the primary contributor of one of the WAL shipping scripts mentioned, that script is very clearly for PosgreSQL 8.2-8.4. Postgres 9.0 includes WAL shipping as a built-in feature. Since that's the piece that we were immediately interested in configuring, I find it very discouraging that the book has sections that weren't updated to PostgreSQL 9.0, despite being titled "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance". More reading will tell for sure, but I fear this is a warmed-over version of a book from the 8.x series.

This is a nice introduction to the topic. A practical guide, with clear explanations. I have both the print and Kindle versions.

I picked up this text in a previous role in order to complete certain tasks that had me working with a PG database. Speaking as a newcomer wih no DBA experience, from simple SQL to more advanced DBA concepts, this certainly gave me the background I needed to get going; it would seem, a lot of material left over to master.