PostgreSQL

The PostgreSQL agent is designed to efficiently manage and protect business critical data in PostgreSQL databases. You can use this agent to backup and restore the entire PostgreSQL server or individual databases. If necessary, you can also restore individual tables.

Key Features

A Wide Range of Backup and Restore Operations

PostgreSQL iDataAgent provides the flexibility to backup the PostgreSQL databases in different modes and restore them in minimal time. You can perform a full or log backups of the entire PostgreSQL server or individual databases or archive logs at any point of time.

The following section describes the backups and restores that can be performed in different modes:

• Backup and Restore Entire PostgreSQL Server: This iDataAgent provides the ability to restore an entire PostgreSQL Server. All the databases that reside on a source server can be restored to a destination server.

  In addition to performing backup and restores of databases, this iDataAgent performs database and log backups like any other database iDataAgent and effortlessly restores all the databases in a PostgreSQL server.

• Backup and Restore Selective Individual Databases: You can use the CommCell Console to create user-defined subclients and distribute some of the database content for dump based backups. Distributing the client data using subclients in this way can help improve backup performance by organizing the workload on the client into logical groupings. While creating user defined subclients for dump based backup data, you can also choose selected object list. This option allows you to save time while restoring this subclient's data.

  You can either define an individual database or a group of databases as subclient data and perform backup and restores.

• Backup Logs: You can perform backups of only the logs in the PostgreSQL server. Log files are generated for each transaction made to the data files in the database. These log files can be used to recover the database transactions that have been lost due to an operating system or disk failure. You can apply them to the File System backup to recover the entire PostgreSQL server to a specific point-in-time.

• Restore Databases to a Point-in-Time: You can restore and recover an entire PostgreSQL server to a point in time for a File System Based Backup. A point in time restore job allows you to restore your PostgreSQL server to a specific point in time, and, typically, this point in time would be just before an undesired transaction, corruption, or update to your database.

Efficient Job Management and Reporting

You can view and verify the status of backup and recovery operations from the Job Controller and the Event Viewer within the CommCell Console. You can also track the status of the jobs using Reports, which can be saved and distributed. Generate reports for different aspects of data management. Customize the reports to display only the required data and save them to a specific location in different formats. For example, you can create a backup job summary report to view the completed backup jobs.

You can schedule, generate and send the Reports via email without user intervention.

Block-Level Backups

You can use block-level backup as a faster method to back up data because only the extents (or modified parts of the database) are backed up rather than the entire PostgreSQL database. You eliminate the need to run a full backup each time the database is changed. For more information, see PostgreSQL Block-Level Backup.

Block-Level Deduplication

Deduplication provides a smarter way to store data by identifying and eliminating the duplicate items in a data protection operation.

Deduplication at the data block-level compares blocks of data against each other. If an object (such as, file, database) contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, then block-level deduplication does not store the redundant data, which reduces the size of the object in storage. This reduces the size of the backup data copies on both the disk and tapes.

Automatic Discovery of Applications

You can use the Auto discover applications option to automatically find PostgreSQL databases in your environment and install software to back up the PostgreSQL databases. For more information, see Automatic Discovery of Applications.

Terminology

The following terminology is used by this product: