How do I clone an entire database from one Postgres instance, to become a part of a database hosted on a different instance?

Question

I have a PostgreSQL instance A with 10 tables, and another instance B hosted on a different box, which contains the same 10 tables but also many others. I'd like to clone all 10 tables from the small database A to overwrite their equivalents in the larger database B . What's a good way to do this?

One path I'm considering is to do a full pg_dump of A , copy that dump file to B 's host, then pg_restore it into B . It seems like it should work since I do want every single table on A to overwrite the table of the same name on B , but I'm just a bit nervous doing a pg_restore of a full database dump, and I'm also not very familiar with pg_dump and pg_restore so it would be great to have that plan validated by someone more knowledgeable.

Answer 1

You can use a plain format pg_dump with the --clean option and specify the tables you want to dump with -t .

Then you get an SQL script that contains only the tables you want replaced, and each table is preceeded with a DROP TABLE .

You can check the script before using it.