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honest question: does anybody know a good book/tutorial/source/whatever on becoming a postgresql DBA ? most of the material i see is written for people that wa

by znpy 2y ago

honest question: does anybody know a good book/tutorial/source/whatever on becoming a postgresql DBA ? most of the material i see is written for people that want to write applications that work with postgresql, not on how to proficiently manage postgresql itself.

oa335 2y ago
2nd Quadrant (bought by Enterprise DB several years ago) had a bunch of excellent YouTube tutorials on common tasks. Some of them may still be available on YouTube. EDB has a fairly comprehensive set of self-paced trainings for sale. I went through them and thought they were really good. Postgres documentation is excellent though, and though the docs are long, reading through it carefully should give you almost all the information you need for most database tasks. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/admin.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/admin.html
edoceo 2y ago
The PostgreSQL docs are great and then watch the presentations from their conferences - very cool stuff. Then practice, docker makes this easy.
lacoolj 2y ago
Most of what I've learned has come from PG docs and various blogs on "we found this crazy thing costing us 100x memory/processing/response time/etc" But there is a great book on the internals (very long, in depth, but not unreadable if you have a good foundation already) - https://edu.postgrespro.com/postgresql_internals-14_en.pdf https://edu.postgrespro.com/postgresql_internals-14_en.pdf They probably have newer versions, this is just what's in my bookmarks
jpitz 2y ago
Greg Smith wrote a book about postgres high performance that does go into the internals a bit and how to analyze performance problems. If you want to be a DBA, this will probably wind up needing to be in your back pocket at some point.
andatki 2y ago
What sorts of skills are you looking to build? Since this post has a lot of comments about query optimization, I’d suggest query optimization is more in the realm of developers and not DBAs. Schema, query, and index design. DBAs might be more focused on replication/HA, security, fleet management, backups, DR. Happy to help with more targeted recommendations!
- znpy 2y ago
  > What sorts of skills are you looking to build? I work as a system engineer / devops engineer / infrastructure engineer. I often need to keep postgresql up and running, ideally in a smooth and performant way. I don't like tool-specific tutorials or storytelling-based articles. I'd like to learn the core postgresql things (terminology, tasks, operations) so that then i can evaluate autonomously what tool to pick and why, rather than following the trend of the month. And of course, being able to actually do "the things". Ideally, the next progression of this would be being able to understand postgresql performance and how to tune it (again, in an holistic manner). Per my understanding, this is the kind of skills that a DBA should have. Some of it overlaps with the skills of a decent developer (i understand that).
justinclift 2y ago
This is a bit older now, but seems like it covers the timeless basics: https://postgrespro.com/community/courses/DBA1 https://postgrespro.com/community/courses/DBA1
- znpy 2y ago
  this looks like the kind of material i'm looking for. I'll take a closer look to the material, which is already good. It's sad that there does not seem to be anything past "DBA1" (that is, no DBA2 or DBA3).
  - justinclift 2y ago
    All of their materials seem to be available on their file share website here: https://edu.postgrespro.com https://edu.postgrespro.com There's some stuff for internals (mentioned in a sibling comment), as well as what seems like stuff for PG15 though I haven't looked at it.

by znpy 2y ago

oa335 2y ago

2nd Quadrant (bought by Enterprise DB several years ago) had a bunch of excellent YouTube tutorials on common tasks. Some of them may still be available on YouTube. EDB has a fairly comprehensive set of self-paced trainings for sale. I went through them and thought they were really good. Postgres documentation is excellent though, and though the docs are long, reading through it carefully should give you almost all the information you need for most database tasks. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/admin.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/admin.html

edoceo 2y ago

The PostgreSQL docs are great and then watch the presentations from their conferences - very cool stuff. Then practice, docker makes this easy.

lacoolj 2y ago

Most of what I've learned has come from PG docs and various blogs on "we found this crazy thing costing us 100x memory/processing/response time/etc" But there is a great book on the internals (very long, in depth, but not unreadable if you have a good foundation already) - https://edu.postgrespro.com/postgresql_internals-14_en.pdf https://edu.postgrespro.com/postgresql_internals-14_en.pdf They probably have newer versions, this is just what's in my bookmarks

jpitz 2y ago

Greg Smith wrote a book about postgres high performance that does go into the internals a bit and how to analyze performance problems. If you want to be a DBA, this will probably wind up needing to be in your back pocket at some point.

andatki 2y ago

What sorts of skills are you looking to build? Since this post has a lot of comments about query optimization, I’d suggest query optimization is more in the realm of developers and not DBAs. Schema, query, and index design. DBAs might be more focused on replication/HA, security, fleet management, backups, DR. Happy to help with more targeted recommendations!

znpy 2y ago
> What sorts of skills are you looking to build? I work as a system engineer / devops engineer / infrastructure engineer. I often need to keep postgresql up and running, ideally in a smooth and performant way. I don't like tool-specific tutorials or storytelling-based articles. I'd like to learn the core postgresql things (terminology, tasks, operations) so that then i can evaluate autonomously what tool to pick and why, rather than following the trend of the month. And of course, being able to actually do "the things". Ideally, the next progression of this would be being able to understand postgresql performance and how to tune it (again, in an holistic manner). Per my understanding, this is the kind of skills that a DBA should have. Some of it overlaps with the skills of a decent developer (i understand that).

justinclift 2y ago

This is a bit older now, but seems like it covers the timeless basics: https://postgrespro.com/community/courses/DBA1 https://postgrespro.com/community/courses/DBA1

znpy 2y ago
this looks like the kind of material i'm looking for. I'll take a closer look to the material, which is already good. It's sad that there does not seem to be anything past "DBA1" (that is, no DBA2 or DBA3).
- justinclift 2y ago
  All of their materials seem to be available on their file share website here: https://edu.postgrespro.com https://edu.postgrespro.com There's some stuff for internals (mentioned in a sibling comment), as well as what seems like stuff for PG15 though I haven't looked at it.