PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: " If you are sorting data, work_mem determines when those sorts are allowed to execute in memory "

A block of code is set as follows:

shared_buffers = 2GB
checkpoint_segments = 32
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9
wal_buffers = 16MB
max_connections = 300

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=8k count=blocks && sync"
time dd if=bigfile of=/dev/null bs=8k

Any command-line input or output is written ...