Standalone hot physical database backup

Hot physical backup is an important capability for databases.

Physical backup allows us to get a completely consistent view of the changes to all databases at once. Physical backup also allows us to back up even while DDL changes are being executed on the database. Apart from resource constraints, there is no additional overhead or locking with this approach.

Physical backup procedures are slightly more complex than logical backup procedures. So, let's start with a simple procedure to produce a standalone backup.

How to do it…

The following steps assume that a number of environment variables have been set, which are as follows:

  • $PGDATA is the path to the PostgreSQL data directory, ending with /
  • $BACKUPNAME is ...

Get PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial