PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance
About a month ago I've bought this book from Greg Smith, and I'm excited with it. It's quite exhaustive collection of information related to "database performance tuning" - note I haven't mentioned PostgreSQL on purpose, as at least a third of the book is about general topics you have to face with every database (hardware limits, filesystems and their advantages/disadvantages, monitoring server using vmstat/iostat/... and identification of typical problems etc.). And besides that there is obviously huge amount of information specific to PostgreSQL ...
The books is built quite systematically, thoughtfully - from the basics, i.e. hardware, benchmarking and limits related to the hardware. Then there are "low level" components of PostgreSQL (buffers, transaction logs, ...) and then things like query plans etc. Just see the table of contents:
- PostgreSQL Versions
- Database Hardware
- Database Hardware Benchmarking
- Disk Setup
- Memory for Database Caching
- Server Configuration Tuning
- Routine Maintenance
- Database Benchmarking
- Database Indexing
- Query Optimization
- Database Activity and Statistics
- Monitoring and Trending
- Pooling and Caching
- Scaling with Replication
- Partitioning Data
- Avoiding Common Problems
So don't expect any "cookbook" how to write fast SQL queries - of course there is a chapter dedicated to query plans (lists and briefly describes all you can see in a query plan), but that's just one of the sixteen chapters.
I personally work with PostgreSQL for several years, and yet I've learned a lot of new useful things. This is simply a "must have" book for all who want to use PostgreSQL seriously.
Another book about PostgreSQL was published at the same time - it's PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook from Simon Riggs and Hannu Krosing. I haven't read it yet, but I have no reason to doubt it's just as good as the book from Greg Smith.
