Category Archives: postgresql

Table sizes in PostgreSQL

Ever wanted to find out how much diskspace each table was taking in a
database? Here’s how:

database=# SELECT
   tablename,
   pg_size_pretty(pg_relation_size(tablename)) AS table_size,
   pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(tablename)) AS total_table_size
FROM
   pg_tables
WHERE
   schemaname = 'public';
 tablename  | table_size | total_table_size
------------+------------+------------------
 deferrals  | 205 MB     | 486 MB
 errors     | 58 MB      | 137 MB
 deliveries | 2646 MB    | 10096 MB
 queue      | 7464 kB    | 22 MB
 unknown    | 797 MB     | 2644 MB
 messages   | 1933 MB    | 6100 MB
 rejects    | 25 GB      | 75 GB
(7 rows)

Table size is the size for the current data.
Total table size includes indexes and data that is too large to fix in
the main table store (things like large BLOB fields). You can find more
information in the PostgreSQL
manual.

Edit: changed to use pg_size_pretty(), which I thought existed, but couldn’t find in the docs. Brett Parker reminded me it did exist after all and I wasn’t just imagining it.

User Administration under PostgreSQL 8.3

A while ago I published an article on PostgreSQL
user administration. Typically, things have changed since I wrote
that article. I thought I’d detail a couple of the differences since
I wrote that guide.

The major difference is that you now have roles rather than users and
you use the CREATE ROLE command to create them instead of
CREATE USER, although the latter command still works. The
command line options for the createuser command have changed as
a result too. Before superuser and the ability to create new users were
the same thing. Now you can give a role permissions to create new roles
without giving them superuser powers. The options are now -s for
superuser and -S for not superuser, -d to allow them to create
databases and -D to disallow database creation and -r to allow the new
role to create other roles and -R to prevent them. for a standard user
you probably want somethig like:

createuser -S -D -R -P user

The -P makes createuser ask you for a password for
the new role.

You can find out more information about the new role system in
PostgreSQL in the user
management and CREATE
ROLE reference sections of the manual.

Backing up PostgreSQL

I decided it was probably time that I started backing up my
PostgreSQL databases and ended up writing a quick script to do just
that. I did have a look at pg_dumpall, but it appears
to only write to stdout, meaning I couldn’t have a file per database
like I wanted.

#!/bin/bash

set -u
set -e

dumpdir=/var/backups/postgresql

date=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
mkdir -p $dumpdir
find $dumpdir -name "*.sql" -mtime +10 -exec rm {} ;
for database in $(su - postgres -c "psql -l -t" | cut -d'|' -f 1 | grep -v template0);
do
        su - postgres -c "pg_dump $database" > $dumpdir/$database-$date.sql;
done

su - postgres -c "pg_dumpall -g" > $dumpdir/global-$date.sql

Just stick that in /etc/cron.daily/postgresql-backups and
you should end up with 10 days worth of backups. I’m not sure if
postgreSQL can have spaces in database names. I’m assuming it can’t.
The only other issue to deal with is not storing it on the same machine
as the database server, let alone on the same physical hardware or even
worse, the same partition.

Update: Corrected typo and added dumping global
objects to the script.

Sorry to anyone that got spammed by my change to pyblosxom
earlier today. I changed the base url, which changed the link of the
entries. I should sort out having proper guids.

Converting Epoch Time values To Timestamps

Just a quick one. If you’ve ever created a table using the number of
seconds since 1970 and realised, after populating it with data, that you
really need it in a TIMESTAMP type? If so, you can quickly convert it
using this SQL:

ALTER TABLE entries
   ALTER COLUMN created TYPE TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE
      USING TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE 'epoch' + created *interval '1 second';

With thanks to the PostgreSQL
manual for saving me hours working out
how to do this.