From using MySQL, I’ve used the ‘unbuffered queries‘ feature a number of times. It’s where you don’t fetch the entire resultset into memory at once – which is necessary if you’re retrieving more data than you have memory available. If’s often also generally gets results/data back to you sooner.
Continue reading “PostgreSQL unbuffered queries and PHP (cursors)”
PostgreSQL Backup script (python)
Perhaps the following will be of use to others. In a nutshell, it’s a python script which backs up a provided list of PostgreSQL databases. I’ve written it for Windows, but it should work on Linux too (just change the paths in the BACKUP_DIR and dumper variables. No doubt it could be changed to query PostgreSQL for a list of databases, and dump these individually (like the MySQL python dumping script I wrote some time ago), but for now… let’s just stick with something simple.
#!python from time import gmtime, strftime import subprocess import os import glob import time # change these as appropriate for your platform/environment : USER = "postgres" PASS = "postgres" HOST = "localhost" BACKUP_DIR = "e:\\postgresql_backups\\" dumper = """ "c:\\program files\\postgresql\\8.1\\bin\\pg_dump" -U %s -Z 9 -f %s -F c %s """ def log(string): print time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S", time.gmtime()) + ": " + str(string) # Change the value in brackets to keep more/fewer files. time.time() returns seconds since 1970... # currently set to 2 days ago from when this script starts to run. x_days_ago = time.time() - ( 60 * 60 * 24 * 2 ) os.putenv('PGPASSWORD', PASS) database_list = subprocess.Popen('echo "select datname from pg_database" | psql -t -U %s -h %s template1' % (USER,HOST) , shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout.readlines() # Delete old backup files first. for database_name in database_list : database_name = database_name.strip() if database_name == '': continue glob_list = glob.glob(BACKUP_DIR + database_name + '*' + '.pgdump') for file in glob_list: file_info = os.stat(file) if file_info.st_ctime < x_days_ago: log("Unlink: %s" % file) os.unlink(file) else: log("Keeping : %s" % file) log("Backup files older than %s deleted." % time.strftime('%c', time.gmtime(x_days_ago))) # Now perform the backup. for database_name in database_list : log("dump started for %s" % database_name) thetime = str(strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M")) file_name = database_name + '_' + thetime + ".sql.pgdump" #Run the pg_dump command to the right directory command = dumper % (USER, BACKUP_DIR + file_name, database_name) log(command) subprocess.call(command,shell = True) log("%s dump finished" % database_name) log("Backup job complete.")
That’s all folks.