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You're reading from  Learn PostgreSQL - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781837635641
Edition2nd Edition
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Authors (2):
Luca Ferrari
Luca Ferrari
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Luca Ferrari

Luca Ferrari has been passionate about computer science since the Commodore 64 era, and today holds a master's degree (with honors) and a Ph.D. from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He has written several research papers, technical articles, and book chapters. In 2011, he was named an Adjunct Professor by Nipissing University. An avid Unix user, he is a strong advocate of open source, and in his free time, he collaborates with a few projects. He met PostgreSQL back in release 7.3; he was a founder and former president of the Italian PostgreSQL Community (ITPUG). He also talks regularly at technical conferences and events and delivers professional training.
Read more about Luca Ferrari

Enrico Pirozzi
Enrico Pirozzi
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Enrico Pirozzi

Enrico Pirozzi, EnterpriseDB certified on implementation management and tuning, with a master's in computer science, has been a PostgreSQL DBA since 2003. Based in Italy, he has been providing database advice to clients in industries such as manufacturing and web development for 10 years. He has been training others on PostgreSQL since 2008. Dedicated to open source technology since early in his career, he is a cofounder of the PostgreSQL Italian mailing list, PostgreSQL-it, and of the PostgreSQL Italian community site, PSQL
Read more about Enrico Pirozzi

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Exploring physical backups

A physical backup is a low-level backup that’s taken during the normal operations of the database cluster. Here, low-level means that the backup is somehow performed “externally” to the backup cluster – that is, at the filesystem level.

As you already know from Chapter 10, Users, Roles, and Database Security, the database cluster requires both the data files contained in PGDATA/base and the WALs contained in PGDATA/wal, as well as a few other files, to make the cluster work properly. The main concept, however, is that the data files and the WALs can make the cluster self-healing and recover from a crash. Hence, a physical backup performs a copy of all the cluster files and then, when the restore is required, it simulates a database crash and makes the cluster self-heal with the WALs in place.

The reason why physical backups are important is that they allow us to effectively clone a cluster, starting from the files it is...

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Learn PostgreSQL - Second Edition
Published in: Oct 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781837635641

Authors (2)

author image
Luca Ferrari

Luca Ferrari has been passionate about computer science since the Commodore 64 era, and today holds a master's degree (with honors) and a Ph.D. from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He has written several research papers, technical articles, and book chapters. In 2011, he was named an Adjunct Professor by Nipissing University. An avid Unix user, he is a strong advocate of open source, and in his free time, he collaborates with a few projects. He met PostgreSQL back in release 7.3; he was a founder and former president of the Italian PostgreSQL Community (ITPUG). He also talks regularly at technical conferences and events and delivers professional training.
Read more about Luca Ferrari

author image
Enrico Pirozzi

Enrico Pirozzi, EnterpriseDB certified on implementation management and tuning, with a master's in computer science, has been a PostgreSQL DBA since 2003. Based in Italy, he has been providing database advice to clients in industries such as manufacturing and web development for 10 years. He has been training others on PostgreSQL since 2008. Dedicated to open source technology since early in his career, he is a cofounder of the PostgreSQL Italian mailing list, PostgreSQL-it, and of the PostgreSQL Italian community site, PSQL
Read more about Enrico Pirozzi