Unlike other services you may come across, a PostgreSQL Health Check is tailored to your specific needs. We take the time to understand your objectives first, then ensure a Health Check addresses those objectives, revealing areas of weakness and presenting you with solutions to fix any problems we uncover.

There are many factors which make a Health Check a good idea but typically there are several common reasons why our customers choose this service:

• Change of usage patterns. Your database was designed for ‘A’ but now you also do ‘B’ and are planning to do ‘C’. You want to make sure the database throughput is optimized.
• Increase in size and scale. Data increases over time and slows down the system. Continuous monitoring and tweaking is required to ensure that the system functions smoothly.
• Hardware upgrades. Make sure your database is fully utilizing the new power. It needs to be tuned to capitalize on the additional available CPU cores and memory. It also needs to optimally utilize disk configuration, e.g. use SSDs for data that is most frequently accessed.
• Simply getting the maximum bang for your buck. A routine health check is preventive maintenance on your mission critical systems to pre-empt problems.
• Validate configuration & deployment against best practices – 2ndQuadrant experts have decades of PostgreSQL talent that you can draw upon to augment your existing in-house expertise. We can identify potential problems and recommend proven industry standards.

Of course, this list is far from exhaustive and your requirements may be entirely different. The value of any expert intervention is specific to every client and that’s also why our Health Check is a bespoke service.

A 2ndQuadrant PostgreSQL Health Check is a comprehensive audit of your database architecture. Based on customer objectives, focus areas are selected from the list below:

• PostgreSQL High Availability and SLA compliance review. Based on your SLA agreements with your customers, we will review the overall integrity of your database to ensure High Availability in order to meet SLA requirements. We will also review Failover strategy.
• Performance Tuning recommendations. Optimize the performance of your database including recommendations for connection pooling, bulk data load, and vacuum analyze strategies based on your application needs.
• Security and Database Hardening review. Understand the access requirements of the organization and then review security and encryption settings of the system.
• Backup/Recovery and Disaster Management review. Plan backups of your data for disaster mitigation and point-in-time recovery.
• Parameter tuning and OS configuration recommendations. It is not just the database configuration that impacts performance; throughput also depends on hardware configuration and how the operating system features are utilized. Get the best recommendations on hardware and OS, and tune configuration parameters to maximize throughput, based on your organizational goals.
• Best practices and Standards compliance review. 2ndQuadrant experts with decades of experience between them will tell you what practices to follow to get the best results from your PostgreSQL installation and help your business comply with industry standards.

2ndQuadrant provides a wide range of professional services specifically to optimize your PostgreSQL databases in enterprise production environments. Our services are designed to fit companies of all sizes; from large enterprises to small startups and everything in between.

PostgreSQL Security Best Practices
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