How do I restore a Postgres database from within a SQL query?

Question

When in development, I need to clean down my system by restoring a database backup and then running SQL against it. Is there a way to do this:

restore schema dbo 'c:/data/mydatabase.backup';
update dbo."MyTable" set "ColumnA" = 1;

Unlike other questions, this is not for doing via the command line but in a query instead.

Postgres v9.5 with pgAdminIII.

Answer 1

There is no support to restore a dump from within a SQL statement in Postgres.

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Some possible (ugly) workarounds:

If your dump is a SQL script you could theoretically run that script from wherever you would run that (hypothetical) restore statement - but that would require parsing the script. And you would need to generate the dump using the --inserts option as otherwise the script contains psql specific statements.

Another workaround could be to create a stored function in a un-trusted language that is able to run operating system commands. The actual restore would still be done by the command line utility, but you could initiate that from within SQL.