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Copy a Postgres database to a target Postgres server (pg_dump | pg_restore on steroids)

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pgcopydb

Documentation Status

Introduction

pgcopydb is a tool that automates running pg_dump | pg_restore between two running Postgres servers. To make a copy of a database to another server as quickly as possible, one would like to use the parallel options of pg_dump and still be able to stream the data to as many pg_restore jobs.

The idea would be to use pg_dump --jobs=N --format=directory postgres://user@source/dbname | pg_restore --jobs=N --format=directory -d postgres://user@target/dbname in a way. This command line can't be made to work, unfortunately, because pg_dump --format=directory writes to local files and directories first, and then later pg_restore --format=directory can be used to read from those files again.

Given that, pgcopydb then uses pg_dump and pg_restore for the schema parts of the process, and implements its own data copying multi-process streaming parts. Also, pgcopydb bypasses pg_restore index building and drives that internally so that all indexes may be built concurrently.

Documentation

Full documentation is available online, including manual pages of all the pgcopydb sub-commands. Check out https://pgcopydb.readthedocs.io/.

$ pgcopydb help
  pgcopydb
    copy-db  Copy an entire database from source to target
  + dump     Dump database objects from a Postgres instance
  + restore  Restore database objects into a Postgres instance
  + copy     Implement the data section of the database copy
  + list     List database objects from a Postgres instance
    help     print help message
    version  print pgcopydb version

  pgcopydb dump
    schema     Dump source database schema as custom files in target directory
    pre-data   Dump source database pre-data schema as custom files in target directory
    post-data  Dump source database post-data schema as custom files in target directory

  pgcopydb restore
    schema      Restore a database schema from custom files to target database
    pre-data    Restore a database pre-data schema from custom file to target database
    post-data   Restore a database post-data schema from custom file to target database
    parse-list  Parse pg_restore --list output from custom file

  pgcopydb copy
    db           Copy an entire database from source to target
    data         Copy the data section from source to target
    table-data   Copy the data from all tables in database from source to target
    blobs        Copy the blob data from ther source database to the target
    sequences    Copy the current value from all sequences in database from source to target
    indexes      Create all the indexes found in the source database in the target
    constraints  Create all the constraints found in the source database in the target

  pgcopydb list
    tables     List all the source tables to copy data from
    sequences  List all the source sequences to copy data from
    indexes    List all the indexes to create again after copying the data
    depends    List all the dependencies to filter-out

Examples

When using pgcopydb it is possible to achieve the result outlined before with this simple command line:

$ export PGCOPYDB_SOURCE_PGURI="postgres://user@source.host.dev/dbname"
$ export PGCOPYDB_TARGET_PGURI="postgres://role@target.host.dev/dbname"

$ pgcopydb copy-db --table-jobs 8 --index-jobs 2

A typical output from the command would contain lots of lines of logs, and then a table summary with a line per table and some information (timing for the table COPY, cumulative timing for the CREATE INDEX commands), and then an overall summary that looks like the following:

18:26:35 77615 INFO  [SOURCE] Copying database from "port=54311 host=localhost dbname=pgloader"
18:26:35 77615 INFO  [TARGET] Copying database into "port=54311 dbname=plop"
18:26:35 77615 INFO  STEP 1: dump the source database schema (pre/post data)
18:26:35 77615 INFO   /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/12/bin/pg_dump -Fc --section pre-data --file /tmp/pgcopydb/schema/pre.dump 'port=54311 host=localhost dbname=pgloader'
18:26:35 77615 INFO   /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/12/bin/pg_dump -Fc --section post-data --file /tmp/pgcopydb/schema/post.dump 'port=54311 host=localhost dbname=pgloader'
18:26:36 77615 INFO  STEP 2: restore the pre-data section to the target database
18:26:36 77615 INFO   /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/12/bin/pg_restore --dbname 'port=54311 dbname=plop' /tmp/pgcopydb/schema/pre.dump
18:26:36 77615 INFO  STEP 3: copy data from source to target in sub-processes
18:26:36 77615 INFO  STEP 4: create indexes and constraints in parallel
18:26:36 77615 INFO  STEP 5: vacuum analyze each table
18:26:36 77615 INFO  Listing ordinary tables in "port=54311 host=localhost dbname=pgloader"
18:26:36 77615 INFO  Fetched information for 56 tables
...
18:26:37 77615 INFO  STEP 6: restore the post-data section to the target database
18:26:37 77615 INFO   /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/12/bin/pg_restore --dbname 'port=54311 dbname=plop' --use-list /tmp/pgcopydb/schema/post.list /tmp/pgcopydb/schema/post.dump

  OID |   Schema |            Name | copy duration | indexes | create index duration
------+----------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------
17085 |      csv |           track |          62ms |       1 |                  24ms
  ...
  ...

                                          Step   Connection    Duration   Concurrency
 ---------------------------------------------   ----------  ----------  ------------
                                   Dump Schema       source       884ms             1
                                Prepare Schema       target       405ms             1
 COPY, INDEX, CONSTRAINTS, VACUUM (wall clock)         both       1s281         8 + 2
                             COPY (cumulative)         both       2s040             8
                     CREATE INDEX (cumulative)       target       381ms             2
                               Finalize Schema       target        29ms             1
 ---------------------------------------------   ----------  ----------  ------------
                     Total Wall Clock Duration         both       2s639         8 + 2
 ---------------------------------------------   ----------  ----------  ------------

Overview

Then pgcopydb implements the following steps:

  1. pgcopydb calls into pg_dump to produce the pre-data section and the post-data sections of the dump using Postgres custom format.

  2. The pre-data section of the dump is restored on the target database using the pg_restore command, creating all the Postgres objects from the source database into the target database.

  3. pgcopydb gets the list of ordinary and partitioned tables and for each of them runs COPY the data from the source to the target in a dedicated sub-process, and starts and control the sub-processes until all the data has been copied over.

    A Postgres connection and a SQL query to the Postgres catalog table pg_class is used to get the list of tables with data to copy around, and the reltuples is used to start with the tables with the greatest number of rows first, as an attempt to minimize the copy time.

  4. An auxiliary process is started concurrently to the main COPY workers. This auxiliary process loops through all the Large Objects found on the source database and copies its data parts over to the target database, much like pg_dump itself would.

    This step is much like pg_dump | pg_restore for large objects data parts, except that there isn't a good way to do just that with the tooling.

  5. In each copy table sub-process, as soon as the data copying is done, then pgcopydb gets the list of index definitions attached to the current target table and creates them in parallel.

    The primary indexes are created as UNIQUE indexes at this stage.

  6. Then the PRIMARY KEY constraints are created USING the just built indexes. This two-steps approach allows the primary key index itself to be created in parallel with other indexes on the same table, avoiding an EXCLUSIVE LOCK while creating the index.

  7. Then VACUUM ANALYZE is run on each target table as soon as the data and indexes are all created.

  8. Then pgcopydb gets the list of the sequences on the source database (via a Postgres connection and SQL queries on the Postgres catalogs) and for each of them runs a separate query on the source to fetch the last_value and the is_called metadata the same way that pg_dump does.

    For each sequence, pgcopydb then calls pg_catalog.setval() on the target database with the information obtained on the source database.

  9. The final stage consists now of running the pg_restore command for the post-data section script for the whole database, and that's where the foreign key constraints and other elements are created.

    The post-data script is filtered out using the pg_restore --use-list option so that indexes and primary key constraints already created in step 4. are properly skipped now.

Installing pgcopydb

Several distributions are available for pgcopydb:

  1. Install from apt.postgresql.org packages by following the linked documentation and then:

    $ sudo apt-get install pgcopydb
    
  2. Install from yum.postgresql.org is not available at this time.

  3. Use a docker image.

    Either use dimitri/pgcopydb from DockerHub, where the latest release is made available with the Postgres version currently in debian stable.

    $ docker run --rm -it dimitri/pgcopydb:v0.7 pgcopydb --version
    

    Or you can use the CI/CD integration that publishes packages from the main branch to the GitHub docker repository:

    $ docker pull ghcr.io/dimitri/pgcopydb:latest
    $ docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/dimitri/pgcopydb:latest pgcopydb --version
    $ docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/dimitri/pgcopydb:latest pgcopydb --help
    
  4. Build from sources

    Building from source requires a list of build-dependencies that's comparable to that of Postgres itself. The pgcopydb source code is written in C and the build process uses a GNU Makefile.

    See our main Dockerfile for a complete recipe to build pgcopydb when using a debian environment.

    Then the build process is pretty simple, in its simplest form you can just use make clean install, if you want to be more fancy consider also:

    $ make -s clean
    $ make -s -j12 install
    

Design Considerations (why oh why)

The reason why pgcopydb has been developed is mostly to allow two aspects that are not possible to achieve directly with pg_dump and pg_restore, and that requires just enough fiddling around that not many scripts have been made available to automate around.

Bypass intermediate files for the TABLE DATA

First aspect is that for pg_dump and pg_restore to implement concurrency they need to write to an intermediate file first.

The docs for pg_dump say the following about the --jobs parameter:

You can only use this option with the directory output format because this is the only output format where multiple processes can write their data at the same time.

The docs for pg_restore say the following about the --jobs parameter:

Only the custom and directory archive formats are supported with this option. The input must be a regular file or directory (not, for example, a pipe or standard input).

So the first idea with pgcopydb is to provide the --jobs concurrency and bypass intermediate files (and directories) altogether, at least as far as the actual TABLE DATA set is concerned.

The trick to achieve that is that pgcopydb must be able to connect to the source database during the whole operation, when pg_restore may be used from an export on-disk, without having to still be able to connect to the source database. In the context of pgcopydb requiring access to the source database is fine. In the context of pg_restore, it would not be acceptable.

For each table, build all indexes concurrently

The other aspect that pg_dump and pg_restore are not very smart about is how they deal with the indexes that are used to support constraints, in particular unique constraints and primary keys.

Those indexes are exported using the ALTER TABLE command directly. This is fine because the command creates both the constraint and the underlying index, so the schema in the end is found as expected.

That said, those ALTER TABLE ... ADD CONSTRAINT commands require a level of locking that prevents any concurrency. As we can read on the docs for ALTER TABLE:

Although most forms of ADD table_constraint require an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock, ADD FOREIGN KEY requires only a SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE lock. Note that ADD FOREIGN KEY also acquires a SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE lock on the referenced table, in addition to the lock on the table on which the constraint is declared.

The trick is then to first issue a CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statement and when the index has been built then issue a second command in the form of ALTER TABLE ... ADD CONSTRAINT ... PRIMARY KEY USING INDEX ..., as in the following example taken from the logs of actually running pgcopydb:

...
21:52:06 68898 INFO  COPY "demo"."tracking";
21:52:06 68899 INFO  COPY "demo"."client";
21:52:06 68899 INFO  Creating 2 indexes for table "demo"."client"
21:52:06 68906 INFO  CREATE UNIQUE INDEX client_pkey ON demo.client USING btree (client);
21:52:06 68907 INFO  CREATE UNIQUE INDEX client_pid_key ON demo.client USING btree (pid);
21:52:06 68898 INFO  Creating 1 indexes for table "demo"."tracking"
21:52:06 68908 INFO  CREATE UNIQUE INDEX tracking_pkey ON demo.tracking USING btree (client, ts);
21:52:06 68907 INFO  ALTER TABLE "demo"."client" ADD CONSTRAINT "client_pid_key" UNIQUE USING INDEX "client_pid_key";
21:52:06 68906 INFO  ALTER TABLE "demo"."client" ADD CONSTRAINT "client_pkey" PRIMARY KEY USING INDEX "client_pkey";
21:52:06 68908 INFO  ALTER TABLE "demo"."tracking" ADD CONSTRAINT "tracking_pkey" PRIMARY KEY USING INDEX "tracking_pkey";
...

This trick is worth a lot of performance gains on its own, as has been discovered and experienced and appreciated by pgloader users already.

Dependencies

At run-time pgcopydb depends on the pg_dump and pg_restore tools being available in the PATH. The tools version should match the Postgres version of the target database.

When you have multiple versions of Postgres installed, consider exporting the PG_CONFIG environment variable to the version you want to use. pgcopydb then uses the PG_CONFIG from the path and runs ${PG_CONFIG} --bindir to find the pg_dump and pg_restore binaries it needs.

Manual Steps

The pgcopydb command line also includes entry points that allows implementing any step on its own.

  1. pgcopydb dump schema
  2. pgcopydb restore pre-data
  3. pgcopydb copy table-data
  4. pgcopydb copy blobs
  5. pgcopydb copy sequences
  6. pgcopydb copy indexes
  7. pgcopydb copy constraints
  8. pgcopydb vacuumdb
  9. pgcopydb restore post-data

Using individual commands fails to provide the advanced concurrency capabilities of the main pgcopydb copy-db command, so it is strongly advised to prefer that main command.

Also when using separate commands, one has to consider the --snapshot option that allows for consistent operations. A background process should then export the snapshot and maintain a transaction opened for the duration of the operations.

Authors

License

Copyright (c) The PostgreSQL Global Development Group.

This project is licensed under the PostgreSQL License, see LICENSE file for details.

This project includes bundled third-party dependencies, see NOTICE file for details.

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Copy a Postgres database to a target Postgres server (pg_dump | pg_restore on steroids)

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