Replacing a production db

Where I work we have a scheme of pushing code+db releases to "testing" and then to "production". Most of our databases use MySQL and I was told they can just rename the db and it works. We are adopting PostgreSQL for some new developments and we'd like to do something similar. I've tried loading the dump in a single transaction, but that has many problems as the database is fairly big for that (some GBs). Is there a trick I'm missing here?

Thanks a lot!

Nicolás.-