I have a site that uses PostgreSQL. All content that I provide in my site is created at a development environment (this happens because it's webcrawler content). The only information created at the production environment is information about the users.
I need to find a good way to update data stored at production. May I restore to production only the tables updated at development environment and PostgreSQL will update this records at production or the best way would be to backup the users information at production, insert them at development and restore the whole database at production?
Thank you
You can use pg_dump to export the data just from the non-user tables in the development environment and pg_restore to bring that into prod.
The -t switch will let you pick specific tables.
pg_dump -d <database_name> -t <table_name>
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/app-pgdump.html
There are many tips arounds this subject here and here.
I'd suggest you to take a look on these links before everything.
If your data is discarded at each update process then a plain dump will be enough. You can redirect pg_dump output directly to psql connected on production to avoid pg_restore step, something like below:
#Of course you must drop tables to load it again
#so it'll be reasonable to make a full backup before this
pg_dump -Fp -U user -h host_to_dev -T=user your_db | psql -U user -h host_to_production your_db
You might asking yourself "Why he's saying to drop my tables"?
Bulk loading data on a fresh table is faster than deleting old data and inserting again. A quote from the docs:
Creating an index on pre-existing data is quicker than updating it incrementally as each row is loaded.
Ps¹: If you can't connect on both environment at same time then you need to do pg_restore manually.
Ps²: I don't recommend it but you can append --clean option on pg_dump to generate DROP statements automatically. Be extreme careful with this option to avoid dropping unnexpected objects.
Related
I have two remote postgres databases with dissimilar data.
One has latest changes (schema related changes like new columns or tables etc.) and the other is outdated, waiting to be synced.
I need to sync the schemae while retaining the data of the outdated one.
What I've done till now is use pg_dump with --schema-only flag and backed up a schema file for the latest database.
Now I don't know if using pg_restore will do the required changes to the outdated database while retaining the data.
I basically want a way to sync schemae of 2 postgres databases using pg_dump and pg_restore commands.
Please let me know if there is an efficient way to do it.
Ok, I screwed up.
I dumped one of my psql (9.6.18) staging database with the following command
pg_dump -U postgres -d <dbname> > db.out
And after doing some testing, I "restored" the data using the following command.
psql -f db.out postgres
Notice the absence of -d option? yup. And that was supposed to be the username.
Annnd as the database happend to have the same name as its user, it overwrote the 'default' database (postgres), which had data that other QAs are using.
I cancelled the operation quickly as soon as I realised my mistake, but the damage was still done. Around 1/3 ~ 1/2 of the database is roughly identical to the staging database - at least in terms of the schema.
Is there any way to revert this? I am still looking for any other dumps if any of these guys made one. But I don't think there is any past two to three months. Seems like I got no choice but to own up and apologise to them in the morning.
Without a recent dump or some sort of PITR replication setup, you can't un-revert this easily. The only option is to manually go through the log of what was restored and remove/alter it in the postgres database. This will work for the schema, the data is another matter. FYI, the postgres database should not really be used as a 'working' database. It is there to be a database to connect to for doing other operations, such as CREATE DATABASE or to bootstrap your way into a cluster. If left empty then the above would not have been a problem. You could have done, from another database, DROP DATABASE postgres; and then CREATE DATABASE postgres.
Do you have a capture of the output of the psql -f db.out postgres run?
Since the pg_dump didn't specify --clean or -c, it should not have overwritten anything, just appended. And if your tables have unique or primary keys, most of the data copy operations should have failed with unique key violations and rolled back. Even one overlapping row (per table) would roll back the entire dataset for that table.
Without having the output, it will be hard to figure out what damage has actually been done.
You should also immediately copy the pg_xlog data someplace safe. If it comes down to it, you might be able to use pg_xlogdump to figure out what changes committed and what did not.
I am using an official postgres v12 docker image that I want to initialise with two SQL dump files that are gathered from a remote legacy v9.2 postgres server during the docker build phase:
RUN ssh $REMOTE_USER#$REMOTE_HOST "pg_dumpall -w -U $REMOTE_DB_USER -h localhost -p $REMOTE_DB_PORT --clean --globals-only -l $REMOTE_DB_NAME" >> dump/a_globals.sql
RUN ssh $REMOTE_USER#$REMOTE_HOST "pg_dump -w -U $REMOTE_DB_USER -h localhost -p $REMOTE_DB_PORT --clean --create $REMOTE_DB_NAME" >> dump/b_db.sql
By placing both a_globals.sql and b_db.sql files into the docker image folder docker-entrypoint-initdb.d, then the database is initialised with the legacy SQL files when the v12 container starts (as described here). Docker is working correctly, the dump files are retrieved successfully. However I am running into problems initialising the container's database and require guidance:
When the container starts to initialise its DB, it stops with ERROR: role $someDBRole does not exist. This is because the psql v9.2 dump SQL files DROP roles before reinstating them; the container DB does not like this. Unfortunately it is not until psql v9.4 that pg_dumpall and pg_dump have the option to --if-exists (see pg_dumpall v9.2 documentation). What would you suggest that I do in order to remedy this? I could manually edit the SQL dump files, but this would be impractical as the snapshots of the legacy DB need to be automated. Is there a way to suppress this error during container startup?
If I want to convert from ASCII to UTF-8, is it adequate to simply set the encoding option for pg_dumpall and pg_dump? Or do I need to take into consideration other issues when upgrading?
Is there a way to supress the removal and adding of the postgres super user which is in the dump SQL?
In general are there any other gotchas when containerising and/or updating a postgres DB.
I'm not familiar with Docker so I don't know how straightforward it'll be do to these things, but in general, pg_dump/dumpall output, when it's in SQL format, will work just fine after having gone through some ugly string manipulation.
Pipe it through sed -e 's/DROP ROLE/DROP ROLE IF EXISTS/', ideally when writing the .sqls, but it's fine to just run sed -i -e <...> to munge the files in-place after they're created if you don't have a full shell available. Make it sed -r -e '/^DROP ROLE/DROP ROLE IF EXISTS/ if you're worried about strings containing DROP ROLE in your data, at the cost of portability (AFAIK -r is a GNU addition to sed).
Yes. It's worth checking the data in pg12 to make sure it got imported correctly, but in the general case, pg_dump has been aware of encoding considerations since time immemorial, and a dump->load is absolutely the best way to change your DB encoding.
Sure. Find the lines that do it in your .sql, copy enough of it to be unique, and pipe it through grep -v <what you copied> :D
I can't speak to the containerizing aspect of things, but - and this is more of a general practice, not even really PG-specific - if you're dealing with a large DB that's getting migrated, prepare a small one, as similar as possible to the real one but omitting any bulky data, to test with to get everything working so that doing the real migration is just a matter of changing some vars (I guess $REMOtE_HOST and $REMOTE_PORT in your case). If it's not large, then just be comfortable blowing away any pg12 containers that failed partway through the import, figure out & do whatever to fix the failure, and start from the top again until it works end-to-end.
A new docker image was recently stood up to replace an existing postgres database. A dump was taken of the database before the old instance was shut down using the following command:
pg_dump -h localhost -p 5432 -d *dbname* -U postgres > *dbname*.pgdump
We'd like to concatenate or append this data to the new database in order to "backfill" some older historical data. The database name and schema of the two databases is identical. What is the easiest, safest way to do this? Secondly, need postgres be shut down during the process?
If overlapping primary keys or unique columns have been assigned to the new data, then there will be no clean way to merge them without putting in some work to clean that up. Assuming that hasn't happened...
The current dump file will have create statements for all the objects that already exists. If you replay that file into the current database, you will get a bunch of errors for all those objects. If you don't have it all run in one transaction, then you could simply ignore those errors. But, you might also load data in the wrong order and get foreign key violations. Those errors will be mixed in with all the other ones about existing object, so might be easy to overlook.
So what I would do is stand up an empty database server, and replay your current dump into that. Then retake the pg_dump, but with either -a or --section=data. Then you should be able to load that dump into your new database. This has two advantages, it will not dump out CREATE statements which are not needed and throw errors which would need to be ignored, and it should dump the tables in an order which will not cause foreign key violations.
I have a bit of a weird issue. We were trying to create a database baseline for our local environment that has very specific data pre-seeded into it. Our hopes were to make sure that everyone was operating with the same data, making collaboration and reviewing code a bit simpler.
My idea for this was to run a command to dump the database whenever we run a migration or decide a new account is necessary for local dev. The issue with this is the database dump is around 17MB. I'm trying to avoid us having to add a 17MB file to GitHub every time we update the database.
So the best solution I could think of was to setup a script to dump each individual table in the database. This way, if a single table is updated, we'd only be pushing that backup to GitHub and it would be more along a ~200kb file as opposed to 17mb.
The main issue I'm running into with this is trying to restore the database. With a full dump, handling the foreign keys is relatively simple as it's all done in a single restore command. But with multiple restores, it gets a bit more complicated.
I'm looking to find a way to restore all tables to a database, ignoring triggers and constraints, and then enabling them again once the data has been populated. (or find a way to export the tables based on the order the foreign keys are defined). There are a lot of tables to work with, so doing this manually would be a bit of a task.
I'm also concerned about the relational integrity of the database if I disabled/re-enable constraints. Any help or advice would be appreciated.
Right now I'm running the following on every single table:
pg_dump postgres://user:password#pg:5432/database -t table_name -Fc -Z9 -f /data/www/database/data/table_name.bak
And then this command to restore all backups to the DB.
$data_command = "pg_restore --disable-triggers -d $dbUrl -Fc \"%s\"";
$backups = glob("$directory*.bak");
foreach($backups as $data_file){
if($data_file != 'data_roles.bak') {
exec(sprintf($data_command, $data_file));
}
}
This obviously doesn't work as I hit a ton of "Relationship doesn't exist" errors. I guess I'm just looking for a better way to accomplish this.
I would separate the table data and the database metadata.
Create a pre- and post-data scfipt with
pg_dump --section=pre-data -f pre.sql mydb
pg_dump --section=post-data -f post.sql mydb
Then dump just the data for each table:
pg_dump --section=data --table=tab1 -f tab1.sql mydb
To restore the database, first restore pre.sql, then all the table data, then post.sql.
The pre- and post-data will change often, but they are not large, so that shouldn't be a problem.