Running the Heartbeat Update and Purge Function

The heartbeat table and associated functions are created from the ADD HEARTBEATTABLE command, however for PostgreSQL, there is no automatic scheduler to call the functions.

One main function controls both the heartbeat record update and the heartbeat history table purge functions. The default settings for both of these features are 60 seconds for the update frequency and 1 day for the history record purge, which deletes all records older than 30 days by default.

To call the main heartbeat record function, users should create an operating system level job that executes “select ggschema.gg_hb_job_run();”. When this function is called, it will take into account the update frequency settings and history record purge settings and use those values regardless of the scheduler settings for the function call.

For example, users can create a Cron Job with the following syntax, and have it run every minute.

*****PGPASSWORD="gguserpasswd" psql -U gguser -d dbname -h remotehost -p 5432 -c "select ggschema.gg_hb_job_run();" >/dev/null
 2>&1

pgAdmin, or pg_cron are other programs that could be used to schedule the function call.