Load database dump into postgres database

Question

I have a database dump about 270MB which I want to load into my local postgres database. I typed in the following command:

pg_dump databasename < dumpfile.sql

After which I get:

--
-- PostgreSQL database dump
--

SET statement_timeout = 0;
SET lock_timeout = 0;
SET client_encoding = 'UTF8';
SET standard_conforming_strings = on;
SET check_function_bodies = false;
SET client_min_messages = warning;

--
-- Name: plpgsql; Type: EXTENSION; Schema: -; Owner:
--

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS plpgsql WITH SCHEMA pg_catalog;


--
-- Name: EXTENSION plpgsql; Type: COMMENT; Schema: -; Owner:
--

COMMENT ON EXTENSION plpgsql IS 'PL/pgSQL procedural language';


--
-- Name: public; Type: ACL; Schema: -; Owner: starlord
--

REVOKE ALL ON SCHEMA public FROM PUBLIC;
REVOKE ALL ON SCHEMA public FROM starlord;
GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO starlord;
GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO PUBLIC;


--
-- PostgreSQL database dump complete
--

To verify if the dump was successful and to check the data I logged into the psql terminal using psql which opens the psql terminal.

If I type \\l I get all the databases. I typed \\c databasename to connect to the database and then \\dt to check the tables. However it keeps showing me No relations found . The same steps work totally fine for other databases ( loading a dump, and then connecting and displaying tables). Moreover after loading the dump if I type \\l+ to see the size of each database, the database I am interested in shows a size of 6973kb where as the dump is 272MB .

Any suggestions as to what could be the issue?

Answer 1

pg_dump is for dumping the database. pg_dump databasename < dumpfile.sql will probably ignore the input file and spew the dump to the screen, which seems to be what you got.

To restore from a dumpfile, pipe it into the Postgres command line tool psql .

psql dbname < dumpfile.sql

See also the Postgres docs on backup and restore .