The PostgreSQL system catalog and system administration functions can aid both developers and administrators to keep the database clean and performant. System catalogs can be used to automate several tasks, such as finding tables without indexes, finding dependencies between database objects, and extracting information about the database using health checks such as table bloats, database size, and so on. Information extracted from the system catalog can be employed in monitoring solutions such as Nagios and in dynamic SQL. This chapter will discuss some tasks a developer and administrator needs to do on a daily basis, such as cleaning up database data and unused objects, building an index automatically, and monitoring database objects access. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• An overview of the system catalog
• System catalog for administrators
• Using system catalog for database clean up.
• The usage of system catalog for performance tuning
• Selective dump for a certain view dependency tree