Chapter 38 — Further Reading

Official reference (🏗️ DBA · 💻 Developer)

  • PostgreSQL Docs: "Server Administration" (the whole part) — configuration, the statistics collector, routine maintenance (VACUUM), backup and restore, high availability, monitoring. The authoritative operations manual. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/admin.html
  • PostgreSQL Docs: "Backup and Restore" — pg_dump/pg_restore, continuous archiving and PITR. Essential reading.
  • PostgreSQL Docs: "Monitoring Database Activity" — pg_stat_activity, pg_stat_statements, the pg_stat_* views.

Configuration & tuning (🏗️ DBA)

  • PGTune (https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/) — a starting-point config generator by RAM/workload (a starting point — then measure).
  • "PostgreSQL configuration / tuning guides" (the wiki, 2ndQuadrant/EDB/Crunchy blogs) — shared_buffers, work_mem, effective_cache_size, autovacuum tuning.
  • pg_stat_statements deep dives — finding and prioritizing the queries to optimize.

Backups & HA (🏗️ DBA)

  • pgBackRest and Barman — robust backup/PITR/retention tools (far safer than a hand-rolled archive_command — Case Study 2).
  • "Test your backups" / disaster-recovery essays — Case Study 1's lesson, repeated across the industry for good reason.
  • Patroni / repmgr — HA/failover for self-hosted PostgreSQL (Chapter 35).

Managed services (everyone)

  • Amazon RDS/Aurora, Google Cloud SQL/AlloyDB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL docs — what they operate for you (backups, failover, patching) and what you still configure/tune.

Monitoring stacks (🏗️ DBA)

  • pganalyze, pgwatch2, Prometheus + Grafana (postgres_exporter), cloud dashboards — production monitoring and alerting (disk, connections, replication lag, slow queries, bloat).

Reference (this book)

  • Chapter 28 — Internals: WAL, VACUUM, buffer pool — what you're administering.
  • Chapter 23–24: indexing and EXPLAIN — the tuning these stats feed.
  • Chapter 27 — Concurrency: connection pooling.
  • Chapter 32 — Security: backups as a security control.

Do, don't just read

  • Back up and restore mercado to a scratch database and verify (the most important exercise in this chapter).
  • Enable pg_stat_statements and find your top queries by total time.
  • Write a runbook for your project: back up, restore, monitor, "the database is slow" checklist.

Next: Chapter 39 — Capstone: your complete database application.