Supported Versions: Current (16) / 15 / 14 / 13 / 12
Development Versions: devel
Unsupported versions: 11 / 10 / 9.6 / 9.5 / 9.4 / 9.3 / 9.2 / 9.1 / 9.0 / 8.4 / 8.3 / 8.2 / 8.1 / 8.0 / 7.4 / 7.3 / 7.2 / 7.1
This documentation is for an unsupported version of PostgreSQL.
You may want to view the same page for the current version, or one of the other supported versions listed above instead.

PostgreSQL 7.3.21 Administrator's Guide

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group


Table of Contents
Preface
1. What's In This Book
1. Installation Instructions
1.1. Short Version
1.2. Requirements
1.3. Getting The Source
1.4. If You Are Upgrading
1.5. Installation Procedure
1.6. Post-Installation Setup
1.6.1. Shared Libraries
1.6.2. Environment Variables
1.7. Supported Platforms
2. Installation on Windows
3. Server Run-time Environment
3.1. The PostgreSQL User Account
3.2. Creating a Database Cluster
3.3. Starting the Database Server
3.3.1. Server Start-up Failures
3.3.2. Client Connection Problems
3.4. Run-time Configuration
3.4.1. pg_settings
3.4.2. Planner and Optimizer Tuning
3.4.3. Logging and Debugging
3.4.4. General Operation
3.4.5. WAL
3.4.6. Short Options
3.5. Managing Kernel Resources
3.5.1. Shared Memory and Semaphores
3.5.2. Resource Limits
3.6. Shutting Down the Server
3.7. Secure TCP/IP Connections with SSL
3.8. Secure TCP/IP Connections with SSH Tunnels
4. Database Users and Privileges
4.1. Database Users
4.2. User Attributes
4.3. Groups
4.4. Privileges
4.5. Functions and Triggers
5. Managing Databases
5.1. Overview
5.2. Creating a Database
5.3. Template Databases
5.4. Database Configuration
5.5. Alternative Locations
5.6. Destroying a Database
6. Client Authentication
6.1. The pg_hba.conf file
6.2. Authentication methods
6.2.1. Trust authentication
6.2.2. Password authentication
6.2.3. Kerberos authentication
6.2.4. Ident-based authentication
6.2.5. PAM Authentication
6.3. Authentication problems
7. Localization
7.1. Locale Support
7.1.1. Overview
7.1.2. Benefits
7.1.3. Problems
7.2. Multibyte Support
7.2.1. Supported character set encodings
7.2.2. Setting the Encoding
7.2.3. Automatic encoding conversion between server and client
7.2.4. What happens if the translation is not possible?
7.2.5. References
7.2.6. History
7.2.7. WIN1250 on Windows/ODBC
7.3. Single-byte character set recoding
8. Routine Database Maintenance Tasks
8.1. General Discussion
8.2. Routine Vacuuming
8.2.1. Recovering disk space
8.2.2. Updating planner statistics
8.2.3. Preventing transaction ID wraparound failures
8.3. Routine Reindexing
8.4. Log File Maintenance
9. Backup and Restore
9.1. SQL Dump
9.1.1. Restoring the dump
9.1.2. Using pg_dumpall
9.1.3. Large Databases
9.1.4. Caveats
9.2. File system level backup
9.3. Migration between releases
10. Monitoring Database Activity
10.1. Standard Unix Tools
10.2. Statistics Collector
10.2.1. Statistics Collection Configuration
10.2.2. Viewing Collected Statistics
10.3. Viewing Locks
11. Monitoring Disk Usage
11.1. Determining Disk Usage
11.2. Disk Full Failure
12. Write-Ahead Logging (WAL)
12.1. General Description
12.1.1. Immediate Benefits of WAL
12.1.2. Future Benefits
12.2. Implementation
12.2.1. Database Recovery with WAL
12.3. WAL Configuration
13. Regression Tests
13.1. Introduction
13.2. Running the Tests
13.3. Test Evaluation
13.3.1. Error message differences
13.3.2. Locale differences
13.3.3. Date and time differences
13.3.4. Floating-point differences
13.3.5. Polygon differences
13.3.6. Row ordering differences
13.3.7. The "random" test
13.4. Platform-specific comparison files
A. Release Notes
A.1. Release 7.3.21
A.1.1. Migration to Version 7.3.21
A.1.2. Changes
A.2. Release 7.3.20
A.2.1. Migration to Version 7.3.20
A.2.2. Changes
A.3. Release 7.3.19
A.3.1. Migration to Version 7.3.19
A.3.2. Changes
A.4. Release 7.3.18
A.4.1. Migration to Version 7.3.18
A.4.2. Changes
A.5. Release 7.3.17
A.5.1. Migration to Version 7.3.17
A.5.2. Changes
A.6. Release 7.3.16
A.6.1. Migration to Version 7.3.16
A.6.2. Changes
A.7. Release 7.3.15
A.7.1. Migration to Version 7.3.15
A.7.2. Changes
A.8. Release 7.3.14
A.8.1. Migration to Version 7.3.14
A.8.2. Changes
A.9. Release 7.3.13
A.9.1. Migration to Version 7.3.13
A.9.2. Changes
A.10. Release 7.3.12
A.10.1. Migration to Version 7.3.12
A.10.2. Changes
A.11. Release 7.3.11
A.11.1. Migration to Version 7.3.11
A.11.2. Changes
A.12. Release 7.3.10
A.12.1. Migration to Version 7.3.10
A.12.2. Changes
A.13. Release 7.3.9
A.13.1. Migration to Version 7.3.9
A.13.2. Changes
A.14. Release 7.3.8
A.14.1. Migration to Version 7.3.8
A.14.2. Changes
A.15. Release 7.3.7
A.15.1. Migration to Version 7.3.7
A.15.2. Changes
A.16. Release 7.3.6
A.16.1. Migration to Version 7.3.6
A.16.2. Changes
A.17. Release 7.3.5
A.17.1. Migration to Version 7.3.5
A.17.2. Changes
A.18. Release 7.3.4
A.18.1. Migration to Version 7.3.4
A.18.2. Changes
A.19. Release 7.3.3
A.19.1. Migration to Version 7.3.3
A.19.2. Changes
A.20. Release 7.3.2
A.20.1. Migration to Version 7.3.2
A.20.2. Changes
A.21. Release 7.3.1
A.21.1. Migration to Version 7.3.1
A.21.2. Changes
A.22. Release 7.3
A.22.1. Overview
A.22.2. Migration to Version 7.3
A.22.3. Changes
A.23. Release 7.2.8
A.23.1. Migration to Version 7.2.8
A.23.2. Changes
A.24. Release 7.2.7
A.24.1. Migration to Version 7.2.7
A.24.2. Changes
A.25. Release 7.2.6
A.25.1. Migration to Version 7.2.6
A.25.2. Changes
A.26. Release 7.2.5
A.26.1. Migration to Version 7.2.5
A.26.2. Changes
A.27. Release 7.2.4
A.27.1. Migration to Version 7.2.4
A.27.2. Changes
A.28. Release 7.2.3
A.28.1. Migration to Version 7.2.3
A.28.2. Changes
A.29. Release 7.2.2
A.29.1. Migration to Version 7.2.2
A.29.2. Changes
A.30. Release 7.2.1
A.30.1. Migration to Version 7.2.1
A.30.2. Changes
A.31. Release 7.2
A.31.1. Overview
A.31.2. Migration to Version 7.2
A.31.3. Changes
A.32. Release 7.1.3
A.32.1. Migration to Version 7.1.3
A.32.2. Changes
A.33. Release 7.1.2
A.33.1. Migration to Version 7.1.2
A.33.2. Changes
A.34. Release 7.1.1
A.34.1. Migration to Version 7.1.1
A.34.2. Changes
A.35. Release 7.1
A.35.1. Migration to Version 7.1
A.35.2. Changes
A.36. Release 7.0.3
A.36.1. Migration to Version 7.0.3
A.36.2. Changes
A.37. Release 7.0.2
A.37.1. Migration to Version 7.0.2
A.37.2. Changes
A.38. Release 7.0.1
A.38.1. Migration to Version 7.0.1
A.38.2. Changes
A.39. Release 7.0
A.39.1. Migration to Version 7.0
A.39.2. Changes
A.40. Release 6.5.3
A.40.1. Migration to Version 6.5.3
A.40.2. Changes
A.41. Release 6.5.2
A.41.1. Migration to Version 6.5.2
A.41.2. Changes
A.42. Release 6.5.1
A.42.1. Migration to Version 6.5.1
A.42.2. Changes
A.43. Release 6.5
A.43.1. Migration to Version 6.5
A.43.2. Changes
A.44. Release 6.4.2
A.44.1. Migration to Version 6.4.2
A.44.2. Changes
A.45. Release 6.4.1
A.45.1. Migration to Version 6.4.1
A.45.2. Changes
A.46. Release 6.4
A.46.1. Migration to Version 6.4
A.46.2. Changes
A.47. Release 6.3.2
A.47.1. Changes
A.48. Release 6.3.1
A.48.1. Changes
A.49. Release 6.3
A.49.1. Migration to Version 6.3
A.49.2. Changes
A.50. Release 6.2.1
A.50.1. Migration from version 6.2 to version 6.2.1
A.50.2. Changes
A.51. Release 6.2
A.51.1. Migration from version 6.1 to version 6.2
A.51.2. Migration from version 1.x to version 6.2
A.51.3. Changes
A.52. Release 6.1.1
A.52.1. Migration from version 6.1 to version 6.1.1
A.52.2. Changes
A.53. Release 6.1
A.53.1. Migration to Version 6.1
A.53.2. Changes
A.54. Release 6.0
A.54.1. Migration from version 1.09 to version 6.0
A.54.2. Migration from pre-1.09 to version 6.0
A.54.3. Changes
A.55. Release 1.09
A.56. Release 1.02
A.56.1. Migration from version 1.02 to version 1.02.1
A.56.2. Dump/Reload Procedure
A.56.3. Changes
A.57. Release 1.01
A.57.1. Migration from version 1.0 to version 1.01
A.57.2. Changes
A.58. Release 1.0
A.58.1. Changes
A.59. Postgres95 Release 0.03
A.59.1. Changes
A.60. Postgres95 Release 0.02
A.60.1. Changes
A.61. Postgres95 Release 0.01