PostgreSQL 7.3 Administrator's Guide

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group


Table of Contents
1. Installation Instructions
1.1. Short Version
1.2. Requirements
1.3. Getting The Source
1.4. If You Are Upgrading
1.5. Installation Procedure
1.6. Post-Installation Setup
1.6.1. Shared Libraries
1.6.2. Environment Variables
1.7. Supported Platforms
2. Installation on Windows
3. Server Run-time Environment
3.1. The PostgreSQL user account
3.2. Creating a database cluster
3.3. Starting the database server
3.3.1. Server Start-up Failures
3.3.2. Client Connection Problems
3.4. Run-time configuration
3.4.1. pg_settings
3.4.2. Planner and Optimizer Tuning
3.4.3. Logging and Debugging
3.4.4. General operation
3.4.5. WAL
3.4.6. Short options
3.5. Managing Kernel Resources
3.5.1. Shared Memory and Semaphores
3.5.2. Resource Limits
3.6. Shutting down the server
3.7. Secure TCP/IP Connections with SSL
3.8. Secure TCP/IP Connections with SSH tunnels
4. Client Authentication
4.1. The pg_hba.conf file
4.2. Authentication methods
4.2.1. Trust authentication
4.2.2. Password authentication
4.2.3. Kerberos authentication
4.2.4. Ident-based authentication
4.3. Authentication problems
5. Localization
5.1. Locale Support
5.1.1. Overview
5.1.2. Benefits
5.1.3. Problems
5.2. Multibyte Support
5.2.1. Supported character set encodings
5.2.2. Setting the Encoding
5.2.3. Automatic encoding conversion between server and client
5.2.4. About Unicode
5.2.5. What happens if the translation is not possible?
5.2.6. References
5.2.7. History
5.2.8. WIN1250 on Windows/ODBC
5.3. Single-byte character set recoding
6. Managing Databases
6.1. Creating a Database
6.1.1. Template Databases
6.1.2. Alternative Locations
6.2. Destroying a Database
7. Database Users and Permissions
7.1. Database Users
7.1.1. User attributes
7.2. Groups
7.3. Privileges
7.4. Functions and Triggers
8. Routine Database Maintenance Tasks
8.1. General Discussion
8.2. Routine Vacuuming
8.2.1. Recovering disk space
8.2.2. Updating planner statistics
8.2.3. Preventing transaction ID wraparound failures
8.3. Routine Reindexing
8.4. Log File Maintenance
9. Backup and Restore
9.1. SQL Dump
9.1.1. Restoring the dump
9.1.2. Using pg_dumpall
9.1.3. Large Databases
9.1.4. Caveats
9.2. File system level backup
9.3. Migration between releases
10. Monitoring Database Activity
10.1. Standard Unix Tools
10.2. Statistics Collector
10.2.1. Statistics Collection Configuration
10.2.2. Viewing Collected Statistics
10.3. Viewing Locks
11. Monitoring Disk Usage
11.1. Monitoring Disk Usage
12. Write-Ahead Logging (WAL)
12.1. General Description
12.1.1. Immediate Benefits of WAL
12.1.2. Future Benefits
12.2. Implementation
12.2.1. Database Recovery with WAL
12.3. WAL Configuration
13. Database Failures
13.1. Disk Filled
13.2. Disk Failed
14. Regression Tests
14.1. Introduction
14.2. Running the Tests
14.3. Test Evaluation
14.3.1. Error message differences
14.3.2. Locale differences
14.3.3. Date and time differences
14.3.4. Floating-point differences
14.3.5. Polygon differences
14.3.6. Row ordering differences
14.3.7. The "random" test
14.4. Platform-specific comparison files
A. Release Notes
A.1. 7.3 Development Branch
A.2. Release 7.3
A.2.1. Overview
A.2.2. Migration to version 7.3
A.2.3. Changes
A.3. Release 7.2.2
A.3.1. Migration to version 7.2.2
A.3.2. Changes
A.4. Release 7.2.1
A.4.1. Migration to version 7.2.1
A.4.2. Changes
A.5. Release 7.2
A.5.1. Overview
A.5.2. Migration to version 7.2
A.5.3. Changes
A.6. Release 7.1.3
A.6.1. Migration to version 7.1.3
A.6.2. Changes
A.7. Release 7.1.2
A.7.1. Migration to version 7.1.2
A.7.2. Changes
A.8. Release 7.1.1
A.8.1. Migration to version 7.1.1
A.8.2. Changes
A.9. Release 7.1
A.9.1. Migration to version 7.1
A.9.2. Changes
A.10. Release 7.0.3
A.10.1. Migration to version 7.0.3
A.10.2. Changes
A.11. Release 7.0.2
A.11.1. Migration to version 7.0.2
A.11.2. Changes
A.12. Release 7.0.1
A.12.1. Migration to version 7.0.1
A.12.2. Changes
A.13. Release 7.0
A.13.1. Migration to version 7.0
A.13.2. Changes
A.14. Release 6.5.3
A.14.1. Migration to version 6.5.3
A.14.2. Changes
A.15. Release 6.5.2
A.15.1. Migration to version 6.5.2
A.15.2. Changes
A.16. Release 6.5.1
A.16.1. Migration to version 6.5.1
A.16.2. Changes
A.17. Release 6.5
A.17.1. Migration to version 6.5
A.17.2. Changes
A.18. Release 6.4.2
A.18.1. Migration to version 6.4.2
A.18.2. Changes
A.19. Release 6.4.1
A.19.1. Migration to version 6.4.1
A.19.2. Changes
A.20. Release 6.4
A.20.1. Migration to version 6.4
A.20.2. Changes
A.21. Release 6.3.2
A.21.1. Changes
A.22. Release 6.3.1
A.22.1. Changes
A.23. Release 6.3
A.23.1. Migration to version 6.3
A.23.2. Changes
A.24. Release 6.2.1
A.24.1. Migration from version 6.2 to version 6.2.1
A.24.2. Changes
A.25. Release 6.2
A.25.1. Migration from version 6.1 to version 6.2
A.25.2. Migration from version 1.x to version 6.2
A.25.3. Changes
A.26. Release 6.1.1
A.26.1. Migration from version 6.1 to version 6.1.1
A.26.2. Changes
A.27. Release 6.1
A.27.1. Migration to version 6.1
A.27.2. Changes
A.28. Release 6.0
A.28.1. Migration from version 1.09 to version 6.0
A.28.2. Migration from pre-1.09 to version 6.0
A.28.3. Changes
A.29. Release 1.09
A.30. Release 1.02
A.30.1. Migration from version 1.02 to version 1.02.1
A.30.2. Dump/Reload Procedure
A.30.3. Changes
A.31. Release 1.01
A.31.1. Migration from version 1.0 to version 1.01
A.31.2. Changes
A.32. Release 1.0
A.32.1. Changes
A.33. Postgres95 Release 0.03
A.33.1. Changes
A.34. Postgres95 Release 0.02
A.34.1. Changes
A.35. Postgres95 Release 0.01
List of Tables
3-1. pg_settings Columns
3-2. Short option key
3-3. System V IPC parameters
5-1. Character Set Encodings
5-2. Client/Server Character Set Encodings
10-1. Standard Statistics Views
10-2. Statistics Access Functions
10-3. Lock Status System View
List of Examples
4-1. An example pg_hba.conf file
4-2. An example pg_ident.conf file