E-Maj extension setup

If E-Maj is already installed in the database, you may need to upgrade it.

Otherwise, some preliminary operations are required.

Preliminary operations

For these operations, the user must log on the concerned database as a superuser.

Tablespace

Optionally, if the E-Maj administrator wants to store E-Maj technical tables into a dedicated tablespace, he can create it if needed and define it as the default tablespace for the session:

SET default_tablespace = <tablespace.name>;

E-Maj components installation

The E-Maj components can now be installed into the database, by executing the SQL command:

CREATE EXTENSION emaj;

To start with, the script verifies that the PostgreSQL version is at least 9.1, and that the current user has the superuser attribute.

Then the script creates the emaj schema with its technical tables, types and functions.

Caution

The emaj schema must only contain E-Maj related objects.

If they are not already present, both emaj_adm and emaj_viewer roles are created.

Finally, the installation script looks at the instance configuration and may display a warning message regarding the -max-prepared-statements parameter.

Changes in postgresql.conf configuration file

Main E-Maj functions set a lock on each table of a processed tables group. If some groups contains a large number of tables, it may be necessary to increase the value of the max_locks_per_transaction parameter in the postgresql.conf configuration file. This parameter is used by PostgreSQL to compute the size of the shared lock table that tracks locks for the whole instance. Its default value equals 64. It can be increased if an E-Maj operation fails with a message indicating that all entries of the shared lock table have been used.

Furthermore, if the parallel rollback client may be used, it will be probably necessary to adjust the max_prepared_transaction parameter.

E-Maj parameters

Several parameters have an influence on the E-Maj behaviour. They are presented in details here.

The parameters setting step is optional. E-Maj works well with the default parameter values.

However, if the E-Maj administrator wishes to take benefit from the rollback operations monitoring capabilities, it is necessary to insert a row into the emaj_param table to setup the value of the dblink_user_password parameter.

Test and demonstration

It is possible to check whether the E-Maj installation works fine, and discover its main features by executing a demonstration script. Under psql, just execute the emaj_demo.sql script that is supplied with the extension:

\i <emaj_directory>/sql/demo.sql

If no error is encountered, the script displays this final message:

### This ends the E-Maj demo. Thank You for using E-Maj and have fun!

Examining the messages generated by the script execution, allows to discover most E-Maj features. Once the script execution is completed, the demonstration environment is left as is, so that it remains possible to examine it or to play with it. To suppress it, execute the cleaning function that the script has created:

SELECT emaj.emaj_demo_cleanup();

This drops the emaj_demo_app_schema schema and both emaj demo group 1 and emaj demo group 2 tables groups.