“We believe that databases need to excel at more than simple selects to be useful for complex tasks, and our positive experiences with PostgreSQL has done nothing but reinforce that philosophy.”
– David McNett
Migrating data hardly ever comes without headaches and the odd “oh shit” moments, but after getting the hang of it, you realize a great level of control.
Postgres comes with two utilities that make it simple to extract a database and restore it to another destination, with flexible options to select which parts of the data you want restored:
pg_dumpis a utility for consistent back-ups of a PostgreSQL database, even if the database is being used concurrently.pg_restoreis a utility for restoring a PostgreSQL database from an archive created bypg_dumpin one of the non-plain-text formats.