Win a book contest – PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to

pg backup book cover

Around the time that Xzilla wrote about the book, Packt contacted me and asked for a review.

Since I generally don't really read technical books, I declined the offer, but Sandy from Packt was very persistent, and asked if I could inform about book giveaway contest.

The book is definitely PostgreSQL related, and Xzilla suggested to check it out, so here it goes:

In the contest you have a chance to win one of four copies of the book.

How to Enter?

All you need to do is head on over to the book page and look through the product description of the book and drop a line via the comments below this post to let Packt know what interests you the most about this book.

That's all. There is of course a deadline: the contest will close on 5th May 2013.

Packt will use email to contact you in case of winning, make sure you provide them with address that you can receive mails from.

Book Description:

Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to is a practical series of proven recipes showing you how to preserve critical business data, and also teach you some advanced methods for restoring this data. It is a perfect manual for managing your critical PostgreSQL data. Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. This hands-on guide provides a quick and easy way to back up and restore your database using PostgreSQL.

20 thoughts on “Win a book contest – PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to”

  1. PostgreSQL is enterprise class database so streaming replication is the most important thing for me. It is nice to see this topis inside this book.

    Thanks

  2. This line summarized the best what I’d be interested about this book : Covering advanced topics such as Warm and Hot standby restore and Streaming replication, Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to gives you the power to make complete backups to guarantee you will always be able to restore your database to full working order

  3. I’d like to see the chapters on warm and hot standby restore and streaming replication.

    What a shame it’s only an e-book though.

  4. It’ll be a perfect complement for my others two postgresql books from packt. I’d expect it to be equally simple and concise.

  5. Partial database exports – both sets of tables from a database and some set of data from sets of tables.

  6. It seems to be backup and restore by example kind of book that is for novice to advance developers, I hope it will be useful in practicing related skills more and will be helpful maturing my database skills. Thanks.

  7. In time real big data, good – reliable and fast backup solution is a big challenge. So i’m looking forward to read Xzilla thought on paraller pgsql solutions and how find place for replication in backups world.

  8. I wonder if that book covers database-level backups only, or if it involves storage-assisted approach as well. For the ones that never did one: database backup may be not only hard to make (otherwise there will be no such books), but also inefficient; consider all the work required for reindexing or recompression (in case RDBMS supports any – like for append-only tables). With storage assistance one can either do raw data backup by taking filesystem snapshot (preserving entire database state) or classic database backup by reattaching storage snapshot to separate (unclustered) process only for the dump. This way allows virtually any backup to be prepared within seconds, regardless of the database size – the time required to shut down, take the snapshot and restart server. Thanks to the COW this takes no extra storage space (only for the updates on the working set) and can be moved to any slower node (or run in low priority). As for the restore only the first method (dumb backup of filesystem) is helpful, as one need to shutdown, switch snapshot and restart server – that might be done in seconds as well; you may consider it poor’s-man PITR, but in some envoronments (like developers/testers) it’s a great thing. I am aware that messing with plain files in replicated/clustered/distributed-in-any-other-way environments might lead to inconsistencies, and like to have them investigated.

  9. We are not yet in production environment. All DB settings are done except backup and replication. Our next issue is streaming replication!

  10. I read the book and it covers all the technical aspects of both logical and physical backup.
    Very well written and an interesting read.
    However, I am surprised that an open-source tool for Disaster Recovery of PostgreSQL databases like Barman is not mentioned at all.
    Is it because it has not been considered at all or it has been tested and evaluated and was deemed not effective. If the latter, it would be helpful feedback for us.

  11. Drastically reduce restore time using Parallel SQL
    Slash backup times with parallel compression
    Synchronize multiple databases as standby backup servers

    These are very good for me.

  12. Harness file system snapshots for stable online binary backups.

    Too bad its only an ebook.

  13. Streaming replication

    It’s nice to become clear picture of it.

  14. And the contest is over. From all the comments above, I chose 4 (well, chose is a strong word for: sort -R emails.lst | head -n 4). These people should have my email now in their inbox.

    Also – the emails were forwarded to Packt, and someone from there will contact you about receiving the ebook.

    Just in case the emails of people who were picked “look like”:
    – b…j@…
    – g…r@…
    – m…t@…
    – r…v@…
    (yes, I verified that these strings uniquely identify emails).

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