Copying untitled columns from tsv file to postgresql? - postgresql

By tsv I mean a file delimited by tabs. I have a pretty large (6GB) data file that I have to import into a PostgreSQL database, and out of 56 columns, the first 8 are meaningful, then out of the other 48 there are several columns (like 7 or so) with 1's sparsely distributed with the rest being 0's. Is there a way to specify which columns in the file you want to copy into the table? If not, then I am fine with importing the whole file and just extracting the desired columns to use as data for my project, but I am concerned about allocating excessively large memory to a table in which less than 1/4 of the data is meaningful. Will this pose an issue, or will I be fine accommodating the meaningful columns into my table? I have considered using that table as a temp table and then importing the meaningful columns to another table, but I have been instructed to try to avoid doing an intermediary cleaning step, so I should be fine directly using the large table if it won't cause any problems in PostgreSQL.

With PostgreSQL 9.3 or newer, COPY accepts a program as input . This option is precisely meant for that kind of pre-processing. For instance, to keep only tab-separated fields 1 to 4 and 7 from a TSV file, you could run:
COPY destination_table FROM PROGRAM 'cut -f1-4,7 /path/to/file' (format csv, delimiter '\t');
This also works with \copy in psql, in which case the program is executed client-side.

Related

Importing issue in postgresql using pgadmin 4

The file is not importing after having created a table. The first line of code is for the table (COPY), the second line of code is for the path of the file (FROM) and the WITH I am not entirely sure if there's a prior line of code that needs to be entered for its success as its not being highlighted in pink. The importing should be going through in either the built-in tool of pgAdmin or the syntax but neither of them generates the needed output. Here are some screenshots:
So I did another table, this time focusing on a single column and ensuring that the name of the column matched on both the table and the file and it worked. The prior example had several columns that had difference in spellings of the column content in table and the file:
You can try this sequentially...
1. First create csv file. .csv file column sequence is most important.
2. Consider the below employee_info.csv file
And consider your database table employee_info table which contain (emp_id [numeric],emp_name[character],emp_sal[numeric],emp_loc [character])
Then Execute the below query
a. copy employee_info(emp_id,emp_name,emp_sal,emp_loc) from 'C:\Users\Zbook\Desktop\employee_info.csv' DELIMITERS ',' CSV;
Note: Ensure that each .csv file row value has not null. Like below...

PostgreSQL: Import columns into table, matching key/ID

I have a PostgreSQL database. I had to extend an existing, big table with a few more columns.
Now I need to fill those columns. I tought I can create an .csv file (out of Excel/Calc) which contains the IDs / primary keys of existing rows - and the data for the new, empty fields. Is it possible to do so? If it is, how to?
I remember doing exactly this pretty easily using Microsoft SQL Management Server, but for PostgreSQL I am using PG Admin (but I am ofc willing to switch the tool if it'd be helpfull). I tried using the import function of PG Admin which uses the COPY function of PostgreSQL, but it seems like COPY isn't suitable as it can only create whole new rows.
Edit: I guess I could write a script which loads the csv and iterates over the rows, using UPDATE. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Edit2: I've found this question here on SO which provides an answer by using a temp table. I guess I will use it - although it's more of a workaround than an actual solution.
PostgreSQL can import data directly from CSV files with COPY statements, this will however only work, as you stated, for new rows.
Instead of creating a CSV file you could just generate the necessary SQL UPDATE statements.
Suppose this would be the CSV file
PK;ExtraCol1;ExtraCol2
1;"foo",42
4;"bar",21
Then just produce the following
UPDATE my_table SET ExtraCol1 = 'foo', ExtraCol2 = 42 WHERE PK = 1;
UPDATE my_table SET ExtraCol1 = 'bar', ExtraCol2 = 21 WHERE PK = 4;
You seem to work under Windows, so I don't really know how to accomplish this there (probably with PowerShell), but under Unix you could generate the SQL from a CSV easily with tools like awk or sed. An editor with regular expression support would probably suffice too.

Dump subset of records in an OpenEdge database table in the ".d" file format

I am looking for the easiest way to manually dump a subset of records in an OpenEdge database table in the Progress ".d" file format.
The best way I can imagine is creating an extra test database with the identical schema as the source database, and then copying the subset of records over to the test database using FOR EACH and BUFFER-COPY statements. Then just export the data from the test database using the Dump Data and Definitions Table Contens (.d file )... menu option.
That seems like a lot of trouble. If you can identify the subset of records in order to do the BUFFER-COPY than you should also be able to:
OUTPUT TO VALUE( "table.d" ).
FOR EACH table NO-LOCK WHERE someCondition:
EXPORT table.
END.
OUTPUT CLOSE.
Which is, essentially, what the dictionary "dump data" .d file is less a few lines of administrivia at the bottom which can be safely omitted for most purposes.

load data to db2 in a single row (cell)

I need to load an entire file (contains only ASCII text), to the database (DB2 Express ed.). The table has only two columns (ID, TEXT). The ID column is PK, with auto generated data, whereas the text is CLOB(5): I have no idea about the input parameter 5, it was entered by default in the Data Studio.
Now I need to use the load utility to save a text file (contains 5 MB of data), in a single row, namely in the column TEXT. I do not want the text to be broken into different rows.
thanks for your answer in advance!
Firstly, you may want to redefine your table: CLOB(5) means you expect 5 bytes in the column, which is hardly enough for a 5 MB file. After that you can use the DB2 IMPORT or LOAD commands with the lobsinfile modifier.
Create a text file and place LOB Location Specifiers (LLS) for each file you want to import, one per line.
LLS is a way to tell IMPORT where to find LOB data. It has this
format: <file path>[.<offset>.<length>/], e.g.
/tmp/lobsource.dta.0.100/ to indicate that the first 100 bytes of
the file /tmp/lobsource.dta should be loaded into the particular LOB
column. Notice also the trailing slash. If you want to import the
entire file, skip the offset and length part. LLSes are placed in
the input file instead of the actual data for each row and LOB column.
So, for example:
echo "/home/you/yourfile.txt" > /tmp/import.dat
Since you said the IDs will be generated in the input data, you don't need to enter them in the input file, just don't forget to use the appropriate command modifier: identitymissing or generatedmissing, depending on how the ID column is defined.
Now you can connect to the database and run the IMPORT command, e.g.
db2 "import from /tmp/import.dat of del
modified by lobsinfile identitymissing
method p (1)
insert into yourtable (yourclobcolumn)"
I split the command onto multiple lines for readability, but you should type it on a single line.
method p (1) means parse the input file and read the column in position 1.
More info in the manual

Redshift - Adding a column, do we have to change our previous CSVs to include it?

I currently have a redshift table in our database that has 10 columns, and I want to add another. It's trivial to do an alter table to do this.
My question - When I do this, will all my old CSV files fail to insert into redshift (via COPY from S3) given they won't have this new column?
I was hoping the columns would just be NULL vs. it failing on import, but I haven't seen any documentation on this.
Ideally I wish I could specify the actual column name in the header row of the CSV, but I haven't seen if that is possible anywhere.
FILLRECORD in COPY command does that: 'Allows data files to be loaded when contiguous columns are missing at the end of some of the records'.