"[R]equiring server installations..." I can only imagine you're used to working with flatfiles from that line ;). I'm mainly going to mirror Thraxil here, I've worked with Oracle, DB2, and PostgreSQL extensively and PostgreSQL does have a rather light maintenance load.

How much work needs to go in will of course depend on your load, dataset, and the equipment you're running on. For many the defaults will be sufficient. Personally, even for light loading, I like spending a bit of extra time on install and tweaking everything to the hardware. Obviously you can do quite a bit partitioning, managing tablespace, etc. but

From the sound of your data/load setting up a couple cron jobs and applying the occasional patch will probably be all the sysadmin work you'll need to invest in it. VACUUM and VACUUM ANALYSE (or the command line wrapper vacuumdb as noted by Thraxil) and some backup cron jobs will probably be the extent of your involvement.

If you're going to be the DBA as well then an occasional audit of expensive queries (using EXPLAIN) and indices maintenance will often prove fruitful; though not required unless you're experiencing poor performance. Again, this is based on what you've said of your application.

To get a peak at the O'Reilly book before it's published (or to preorder), Command Prompt (the writers) have it online here. Bruce Momjian's PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts is also available online. And you can of course always read the official Administrator's Guide.

P.S. You may want to ask the editors to put an [OT] in the title of the post.

In reply to Re(3): Sysadmin Aspects of DBMS by Arguile
in thread Sysadmin Aspects of DBMS by jlongino

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.