Questions tagged [postgresql-copy]

Besides the shell utilities pg_dump and pg_restore for backup and restore, there is also the SQL command COPY in PostgreSQL to move data between files and database tables quickly. Several file formats are supported: text, csv and binary.

The meta-command \copy in the psql interface is a wrapper for the SQL command that reads and writes files local to the client (while COPY is for files on the server).

Examples

Write all rows from a table employees to a CSV file on the DB server with SQL COPY:

COPY employees TO '/path/to/employees.csv' (FORMAT csv);

There are more examples for COPY in the manual .

Read data from a CSV file on the client machine into a table with matching structure with \copy in psql (appending to existing data):

\copy employees FROM '/path/to/employees.csv' (FORMAT csv);