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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    pg_controldata

    Josh Tolley

    By Josh Tolley
    March 9, 2009

    PostgreSQL ships with several utility applications to administer the server life cycle and clean up in the event of problems. I spent some time lately looking at what is probably one of the least well known of these, pg_controldata. This useful utility dumps out a number of useful tidbits about a database cluster, given the data directory it should look at. Here’s an example from a little-used 8.3.6 instance:

    josh@eddie:~$ pg_controldata
    pg_control version number:            833
    Catalog version number:               200711281
    Database system identifier:           5291243377389434335
    Database cluster state:               in production
    pg_control last modified:             Mon 09 Mar 2009 04:05:23 PM MDT
    Latest checkpoint location:           0/B70E5B9C
    Prior checkpoint location:            0/B70E5B5C
    Latest checkpoint's REDO location:    0/B70E5B9C
    Latest checkpoint's TimeLineID:       1
    Latest checkpoint's NextXID:          0/307060
    Latest checkpoint's NextOID:          37410
    Latest checkpoint's NextMultiXactId:  1
    Latest checkpoint's NextMultiOffset:  0
    Time of latest checkpoint:            Fri 06 Mar 2009 02:27:02 PM MST
    Minimum recovery ending location:     0/0
    Maximum data alignment:               4
    Database block size:                  8192
    Blocks per segment of large relation: 131072
    WAL block size:                       8192
    Bytes per WAL segment:                16777216
    Maximum length of identifiers:        64
    Maximum columns in an index:          32
    Maximum size of a TOAST chunk:        2000
    Date/time type storage:               floating-point numbers
    Maximum length of locale name:        128
    LC_COLLATE:                           en_US.UTF-8
    LC_CTYPE:                             en_US.UTF-8
    

    I can’t claim to speak with authority on all these data, but leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the meaning of those that appear most captivating. One of pg_controldata’s more interesting features is that it doesn’t have to actually connect to anything; it reads everything from the disk. That means you can use it on databases in the middle of WAL recovery, even though you can’t actually query the recovering database. The check_postgres.pl script uses this unique capability to make inferences about the health of a WAL replica, specifically by making sure checkpoints happen fairly regularly. pg_controldata requires only one argument, the data directory of the PostgreSQL instance you’re interested in, and that only if you haven’t already set the PGDATA environment variable.

    postgres


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