At this year's OSCon in Portland, Oregon, Christophe Pettus is presenting a morning tutorial on "Postgres Unboxing" at 9:00 am on July 17.
In this one intense tutorial, we’ll go from a bare machine with just a PostgreSQL source tarball or RPM in hand to a fully-functional, replicated, backed-up, tuned database installation. We’ll cover:
1. Installing the base PostgreSQL package and important additional modules. 2. How to lay out the installation and the various components of PostgreSQL in the right places in the file system. 3. Basic PostgreSQL tuning and optimization for particular hardware. 4. Getting PostgreSQL streaming replication/hot standby set up. 5. Doing backups. 6. Monitoring and performance checking once your database is in production. 7. Disaster planning and recovery.
Only basic system administration experience is required; if you can type commands into bash, you’re qualified.