Here's the situation.... - The DB contains data for several projects. - The tables of the DB contain data for all projects (data is not partitioned on project name or anything like that) - The "project" identifier (table column) exists in a few "parent" tables with many child... grandchild,... tables under them connected with foreign keys defined with "on delete cascade". So if a record in one of the parent table records is deleted, all of its underlying, dependent records get deleted too. - New projects come in, and old ones need to be removed and "archived" in DBs of their own. So there's a DB called "active_projects" and there's a DB called "project_a_archive" (identical metadata). - The idea is to copy the data for project "a" that's in "active_projects" to the "project_a_arhchive" DB AND delete the project a data out of "active_projects". - Leave "project_a_archive" up and running if someone needs to attach to that and get some old/archived data.
The brute-force method I've been using is... 1) pg_dump "active_projects" to a (huge) file then populate "project_a_archive" using that (I don't have the privs to create database, IT creates an empty one for me, so this is how I do it). 2) go into the "project_a_archive" DB and run... "delete from par_tbl_1 where project <> 'a' ", "delete from par_tbl_2 where project <> 'a' ", etc... leaving only project "a" data in the DB. 3) go into the "active_projects" DB and "delete from par_tbl_1 where project = 'a' ", etc... removing project "a" from the "active_projects DB. Ya, not very elegant, it takes a long time and it takes a lot of resources. So I'm looking for ideas on how to do this better. Related question... The "delete from par_tbl_a where project <> 'a' " is taking forever. I fear it's because it's trying to journal everything in case I want to rollback. But this is just in the archive DB and I don't mind taking the risk if I can speed this up outside of a transaction. How can I run a delete command like this without the rollback recovery overhead ?
