Admin Pack for PostgreSQL and pgAdmin

PgAdmin3 admittedly is a nice Postgres GUI. It's got features from simple query tool to server monitoring. However, if you have your "Guru Hints" on, you'll see the following message in a pop-up window:

Server instrumentation
The server lacks instrumentation functions.

pgAdmin III uses some support functions that are not available by default in all PostgreSQL versions. These enable some tasks that make life easier when dealing with log files and configuration files.

When you install PostgreSQL 8.0 or up using the Windows installer, you just need to select the "admin" or "adminpack" module.c

When compiling from source, the necessary files can be found in the xtra subdirectory of the pgAdmin source tree. For PostgreSQL 8.0, copy the admin directory under the postgresql contrib source directory, make and make install from there. For PostgreSQL 8.1, use the admin81 directory for that.

PostgreSQL 8.2 and above include the instrumentation functions in the "adminpack" contrib module. After the module is installed, you need to create the instrumentation functions in your maintenance database using the admin.sql script (admin81.sql for PostgreSQL 8.1) which are usually located in the pgsql share directory (e.g. /usr/local/pgsql/share)

Extended server instrumentation is not supported for PostgreSQL 7.3 and 7.4.

While this does provide useful informaiton about some sort of adminpack that is necessary, the actually steps necessary are omitted.


What is adminpack?

As it turns out Postgres comes with a number of additional helpful "contrib" sets of functions which you can install on demand .

One of these sets of function is the Admin Pack it, which:

"provides a number of support functions which pgAdmin and other administration and management tools can use to provide additional functionality, such as remote management of server log files."

Read more about it at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/adminpack.html


Installation:

Locate adminpack.sql on your system.
On Gentoo for PostgreSQL 8.4 it is in: /usr/share/postgresql-8.4/contrib/

Installation itself is quite simple:

psql -U postgres --file /usr/share/postgresql-8.4/contrib/adminpack.sql

* Substitute "postgres" for your distor's default PosgreSQL admin user.

Now close down pgadmin, restart PostgreSQL server and run pgadmin again.

If you ever need to uninstall it you can run:

psql -U postgres --file /usr/share/postgresql-8.4/contrib/uninstall_adminpack.sql

Other Utility Functions:

AdminPack is not the only goodie that Postgre comes with. The full list of additional utilities can be found here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/contrib.html

A quick look inside the contrib/ folder reveals:

_int.sql            fuzzystrmatch.sql        pg_trgm.sql
adminpack.sql       hstore.sql               pgcrypto.sql
autoinc.sql         insert_username.sql      pgrowlocks.sql
btree_gin.sql       int_aggregate.sql        pgstattuple.sql
btree_gist.sql      isn.sql                  pgxml.sql
chkpass.sql         lo.sql                   refint.sql
citext.sql          ltree.sql                seg.sql
cube.sql            moddatetime.sql          sslinfo.sql
dblink.sql          pageinspect.sql          tablefunc.sql
dict_int.sql        pg_buffercache.sql       test_parser.sql
dict_xsyn.sql       pg_freespacemap.sql      timetravel.sql
earthdistance.sql   pg_stat_statements.sql   tsearch2.sql