Hmmm… maybe I should reconsider rebooting my server until tomorrow. Stupid maintenance…

As a newly minted Packt author, it makes sense that I might get a request to review one of their books from time to time. On this particular occasion, I have the opportunity to give a look at Instant PostgreSQL Starter by fellow PostgreSQL user and author Daniel K. Lyons. I’ll be straight-forward with a giant caveat that I’m not the target audience for this booklet. I tried to read with the perspective of a new user since we’ve all been there once, but please bear with me if I break character.

It occurs to me I forgot to congratulate the winners of the free ebooks. So without further ado: SAB, who seems to host a nice blog geared toward server administration. Stephan, who’s looking to improve existing strategies. Jeff and his growing PostgreSQL cluster. Pierre, who apparently has an experimental PostgreSQL backend for MySQL. Interesting. Congrats to the winners. But more, I call upon them to pay it forward by contributing to the community, either by corresponding with the excellent PostgreSQL mailing lists, or maybe submitting a patch or two to the code.

Let’s face it, the pg_hba.conf file is a pain in the ass to use regularly. Sure, reloading the database will cause it to re-read this file, but with a lot of active users and frequent changes, this isn’t really tenable. Luckily lurking deep within its bowels, PostgreSQL has a little-known feature that can easily be overlooked because it’s so humbly stated. Here’s the manual entry for pg_hba.conf for the user section:

A little while ago, I wrote to the PostgreSQL general mailing list that I’d been approached by Packt Publishing to contribute a quick manual on doing PostgreSQL backups: Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to. They’re the same guys who published Greg Smith’s PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance book which everyone seems to swear by. The goal of the backup book was to distill the PostgreSQL documentation, tools, and Wiki down to a collection of short step-by-step guides much like the O’Reilly nutshell series.