On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 16:43 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
You can use "ALTER DATABASE name RENAME TO newname;". Does that help?
This is what I do now to evolve from development to staging to production, as well as to deprecate versions. That indeed solves most of the problem.
Aliases might solve two problems. The first is to address the oft-recurring problem of wanting to be able to refer simultaneously to an instance and more generally to a concept (e.g., HEAD in cvs, or /etc/alternatives/ for system executables, etc). That is, one could refer to a specific db version/instance as well as a name for the "most recent" version (or dev, stage, prod, or whatever).
The second goal is more practical: postgres doesn't allow a database to be renamed while it's in use and that prohibition causes minor scheduling problems when rotating instances. I imagine that db aliases would affect only new connections.
Thanks,
Reece