I agree. When restoring a database from back up, I do a drop database and recreate it to make sure everything is properly intact (tables, columns, views, triggers, foreign keys, etc...). We do this a lot for testing. We backup the production database, copy to test server and do a restore on the test database. It helps us test our code rollouts.
-Aaron
On 6/18/06, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: Infor Gates <info_gates@yahoo.com> writes:
> I am having the impression that pg_restore would over-rides the "old"
> data with the current one. Is my thinking wrong?
Yeah. By default, pg_restore will issue a CREATE TABLE (which of course
fails if the table already exists) followed by COPY (which just tries to
insert data in addition to what might be there already).
There's a command line option to ask pg_restore to try to DROP TABLE
before doing the CREATE TABLE. By and large, though, that's a bad way
to proceed unless you are specifically trying to merge two databases.
The fast and easy way to proceed is to DROP DATABASE, CREATE a fresh
empty database, and pg_restore into that.
regards, tom lane