How to do it…

Write a document that covers the following items:

• Database design - plan your database design
• Calculate the initial database sizing
• Transaction analysis - How will we access the database?
• Look at the most frequent access paths
• What are the requirements for response times?
• Hardware configuration
• Initial performance thoughts - Will all of the data fit into the RAM?
• Choose the operating system and filesystem types
• How do we partition the disk?
• Localization plan
• Decide the server encoding, locale, and time zone
• Access and security plan
• Identify client systems and specify the required drivers
• Create roles according to a plan for access control
• Specify pg_hba.conf
• Maintenance plan - Who will keep it working? How?
• Availability plan - consider the availability requirements
• checkpoint_timeout (for more details on this parameter, see the Understanding and controlling crash recovery recipe in Chapter 11, Backup and Recovery)
• Plan your backup mechanism, and test it
• High-availability plan
• Decide which form of replication you'll need, if any