How to copy a database table from one database to another

Question

I am looking to perform some database operations programatically inside a Django application, namely, I want to:

• Copy Table A in Database A over to Table A (table name preserved) in Database B, then clean-up and remove Table A.

Therefore, I have a number of possible options to try and utilise:

• I could try and call "pgdump" from the application, using some sort of system call.
• I could potentially utilise the psycopg package.
• I have a preference to use Django's built in with connection.cursor() as cursor

Assumptions:

• "Table A" exists in Database A but "Table A" (both schema and data) does not exist in Database B.
• Database A and Database B exist on different "HOSTs"

What would be the some potential methods to achieve this? I need something like this but to talk between the two databases, source and target...

CREATE TABLE [Table to copy To]
AS [Table to copy From]
WITH NO DATA;

Answer 1

1) you can do it using dblink :

# connect to pg
# psql -U user_here etc...
-- create a few db
create database first;
create database second;

-- connect to first db and create a table with a few records
\c first;

create table users
(
    id serial not null
        constraint users_pk
            primary key,
    name varchar(20) not null
);


INSERT INTO public.users (id, name) VALUES (1, 'first');
INSERT INTO public.users (id, name) VALUES (2, 'sec');
INSERT INTO public.users (id, name) VALUES (3, 'one_more');
INSERT INTO public.users (id, name) VALUES (4, 'etc');

-- connect to second db and copy table with data
\c second;
-- dblink -- executes a query in a remote database 
create extension dblink;

-- set your creds...
CREATE TABLE users AS SELECT * FROM dblink('dbname=first user=root password=root', 'select id, name from users') as tbl(id int, name varchar(20));

-- check data:
SELECT * FROM users;

2) you can do it using pg_dump :

# generate dump with data of users table from first db
pg_dump -U root -d first --table=users --inserts > /tmp/users.dump
# run dump script on second db
psql -U root -d second < /tmp/users.dump;

3) you can do it using pandas :

import pandas as pd
from sqlalchemy import create_engine


for df in pd.read_sql(
    'SELECT * FROM users',
    con=create_engine('postgres+psycopg2://root:root@localhost:5432/first', echo=True),
    chunksize=1000
):
    df.to_sql(
        con=create_engine('postgres+psycopg2://root:root@localhost:5432/second', echo=True),
        name='users',
        index=False,
        if_exists='append'
    )