New Book Review: "PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook (Second Edition)"

New book review for PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook (Second Edition), by Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli, and Hannu Krosing, Packt Publishing, 2015, reposted here:

This book provides helpful material for those like myself who are relatively new to PostgreSQL, but not new to relational database products. While I had some earlier exposure to PostgreSQL, it was not until reading a book by Eric Redmond and Jim Wilson a couple years ago called "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks" (see my review) that I was forced to consider PostgreSQL as a viable alternative to dominant commercial databases, having been a longtime user of Oracle, DB2, and in the past few years, SQL Server. When recently faced with recommending a relational database product to a new client open to options who ended up choosing PostgreSQL from one of my top two recommendations, however, I knew that I needed to get acquainted with the product in a relatively short time period.

Books which cover PostgreSQL are becoming more available as adoption of the database product increases, but compared to the other aforementioned databases there are very few from which to choose (although this is partially due to the fact that the online reference materials are considered excellent in general and particularly good from an open source perspective). While I value the online reference materials provided by PostgreSQL, as well as the open source community, I typically prefer a text if a decent one is available and the technologies involved are not too bleeding edge. Packt Publishing seems to have the most texts available at this point in time, and I considered some of their other offerings such as "PostgreSQL for Data Architects" and "PostgreSQL Developers Guide", but these seemed to be targeting differing audiences.

The authors claim to present "over 150 recipes to help you run an efficient PostgreSQL database in the cloud", and while I have not taken the time to count them, this book is hefty at about 450-pages in length, which might initially shy away some potential readers. However, what the authors present is organized very well, and readers should not feel obliged to read it in order from cover-to-cover, since it is written in a practical manner in order to provide quick answers to common questions and problems. The content is progressively presented in 12 chapters: "First Steps", "Exploring the Database", "Configuration", "Server Control", "Tables and Data", "Security", "Database Administration", "Monitoring and Diagnosis", "Regular Maintenance", "Performance and Concurrency", "Backup and Recovery", and "Replication and Upgrades".

Each of these topics are covered in a clear, step-by-step manner that I think many technologists will appreciate. Just be aware that the authors do not cover development per se. This aspect does not bother me as a database architect for web applications, because I typically seek to minimize database development, but those who disagree with this philosophy or wish to use PostgreSQL for a data project (such as data warehousing or data integration) may want to consider other supplementary books offered by this publisher. One last point in which some readers might be interested is that this book was written by active PostgreSQL committers, including Simon Riggs who has contributed to PostgreSQL as a major developer for more than 10 years, and shares some especially good insights in the last two chapters.