Buy this book, now.

I've had Greg Smith's new book PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance for a couple of weeks now, and I've been digesting it bit by bit. The first thing to say is that I think everyone who uses PostgreSQL other than very casually should get this book. This is a book by an expert, and with it you too can become an expert in getting the best out of your hardware and software with PostgreSQL. In 400 or so pages and 16 chapters Greg covers everything from choosing and benchmarking disks and file systems, to server tuning, to query optimization.

The material is dense. This is not a "hold your hands" tutorial for beginners. It's a "get down and dirty under the hood" guide to extracting the most out of your setup. But it doesn't assume that you have very much knowledge. It just assumes that you have a desire for knowledge and a bit of persistence in acquiring it. DBAs should love this book. So should applications programmers.

One thing I liked is that I found very little in the way of inaccuracies. All too often I've found pretty egregious errors in books on technical subjects I happen to know something about. On one occasion, I refused to review a book because I couldn't do so honestly without causing some offence I wanted to avoid. But this book is well written and very accurate, from what I can tell, a tribute both to the author and the highly competent reviewers.

One slightly annoying thing in the actual book production is the treatment of quoted source and output. There's too much line wrapping, which makes SQL hard to read and explain plans almost entirely illegible. I think the latter would probably have been better done as YAML style output, which usually trades width for depth.

But that's a relatively minor nit. Overall, this book is highly recommended. I doubt there is a single PostgreSQL user or developer who could not learn something useful from this book.