Recommended Procedure for Archiving Table Data

[Sally Ruggero]

I need advice on archiving data from our production database.

Each night I would like to save and remove a day's data from two weeks ago, from all the tables. I know how to delete the data--though our schema does not specify cascaded deletes. However, I can't figure out how to save the desired data. I'd like to save it in SQL insert statement format, but I can't see how to get the data out. If I use psql to create a temp table with the old data in it, then the table disappears when I exit psql and I can't dump it with pg_dump. If I make a new table and put the data in it, then when I dump it with pg_dump, all the insert statements have the new table name rather than the original table name. I'm sure there's a good solution for this standard problem. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Thanks,
Sally

[Joshua D. Drake]

Sally Ruggero wrote:

I need advice on archiving data from our production database.

Each night I would like to save and remove a day's data from two weeks
ago, from all the tables. I know how to delete the data--though our
schema does not specify cascaded deletes. However, I can't figure out
how to save the desired data. I'd like to save it in SQL insert
statement format, but I can't see how to get the data out. If I use
psql to create a temp table with the old data in it, then the table
disappears when I exit psql and I can't dump it with pg_dump. If I
make a new table and put the data in it, then when I dump it with
pg_dump, all the insert statements have the new table name rather than
the original table name. I'm sure there's a good solution for this
standard problem. Does anyone have a suggestion?
Create a temporary table from a query definition...
BEGIN;
create temp table archive_table as select * from foo where date between ....
delete from foo where date between ...
copy foo to '/tmp/archive.copy'
commit;

You probably want to at least do some basic checks on the data like row
counts
but that will archive out the data.

You could also just create an archival schema that you could push stuff to.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

Thanks,
Sally

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