On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Roland Hughes
<roland@logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
Hello,
I have had a question for some time and cannot seem to find an answer.
Is there a way to add pre-existing tablespace to a fresh Postgres install?
Typically I create tablespace on some TB drives and place all databases there. The default OpenSuSE 64-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit installations have Postgres looking at the root drive. I don't have a problem with that, but do want the ability to add tablespace (including all of its stored data) which was already in existence prior to the re-install/new-install.
I can do this with commercial products like RDB on OpenVMS.
I'm trying to avoid the pain of unload/recreate/reload when upgrading OS versions. In many cases, they don't even change the Postgres version. Unloading multiple TB of binary data to text then reloading is a major tactical problem.
In postgres, there is no concept of a 'transportable tablespace' (to use a term for another commercial RDBMS), however, if your data directory, and I mean the whole thing, not just one tablespace, survives the OS upgrade, all you need to do is start the db server against that data directory.
By data directory, I mean the whole thing, i.e.
global
base
pg_xlog
pg_clog
postgresql.conf
......
You cannot run a new 'initdb' and then have an external tablespace copied in.
--Scott