COPY

Description

COPY moves data between PostgreSQL tables and standard file-system files. COPY TO copies the contents of a table to a file, while COPY FROM copies data from a file to a table (appending the data to whatever is in the table already).

If a list of columns is specified, COPY will only copy the data in the specified columns to or from the file. If there are any columns in the table that are not in the column list, COPY FROM will insert the default values for those columns.

COPY with a file name instructs the PostgreSQL server to directly read from or write to a file. The file must be accessible to the server and the name must be specified from the viewpoint of the server. When STDIN or STDOUT is specified, data is transmitted via the connection between the client and the server.

Parameters

Notes

COPY can only be used with plain tables, not with views.

The BINARY key word causes all data to be stored/read as binary format rather than as text. It is somewhat faster than the normal text mode, but a binary-format file is less portable across machine architectures and PostgreSQL versions.

You must have select privilege on the table whose values are read by COPY TO, and insert privilege on the table into which values are inserted by COPY FROM.

Files named in a COPY command are read or written directly by the server, not by the client application. Therefore, they must reside on or be accessible to the database server machine, not the client. They must be accessible to and readable or writable by the PostgreSQL user (the user ID the server runs as), not the client. COPY naming a file is only allowed to database superusers, since it allows reading or writing any file that the server has privileges to access.

Do not confuse COPY with the psql instruction \copy. \copy invokes COPY FROM STDIN or COPY TO STDOUT, and then fetches/stores the data in a file accessible to the psql client. Thus, file accessibility and access rights depend on the client rather than the server when \copy is used.

It is recommended that the file name used in COPY always be specified as an absolute path. This is enforced by the server in the case of COPY TO, but for COPY FROM you do have the option of reading from a file specified by a relative path. The path will be interpreted relative to the working directory of the server process (somewhere below the data directory), not the client's working directory.

COPY FROM will invoke any triggers and check constraints on the destination table. However, it will not invoke rules.

COPY input and output is affected by DateStyle. To ensure portability to other PostgreSQL installations that might use non-default DateStyle settings, DateStyle should be set to ISO before using COPY TO.

COPY stops operation at the first error. This should not lead to problems in the event of a COPY TO, but the target table will already have received earlier rows in a COPY FROM. These rows will not be visible or accessible, but they still occupy disk space. This may amount to a considerable amount of wasted disk space if the failure happened well into a large copy operation. You may wish to invoke VACUUM to recover the wasted space.

File Formats

Examples

The following example copies a table to the client using the vertical bar (|) as the field delimiter:

COPY country TO STDOUT WITH DELIMITER '|';

To copy data from a file into the country table:

COPY country FROM '/usr1/proj/bray/sql/country_data';

To copy into a file just the countries whose names start with 'A' using a temporary table which is automatically deleted:

BEGIN;
CREATE TEMP TABLE a_list_countries AS
    SELECT * FROM country WHERE country_name LIKE 'A%';
COPY a_list_countries TO '/usr1/proj/bray/sql/a_list_countries.copy';
ROLLBACK;

Here is a sample of data suitable for copying into a table from STDIN:

AF      AFGHANISTAN
AL      ALBANIA
DZ      ALGERIA
ZM      ZAMBIA
ZW      ZIMBABWE

Note that the white space on each line is actually a tab character.

The following is the same data, output in binary format. The data is shown after filtering through the Unix utility od -c. The table has three columns; the first has type char(2), the second has type text, and the third has type integer. All the rows have a null value in the third column.

0000000   P   G   C   O   P   Y  \n 377  \r  \n  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000020  \0  \0  \0  \0 003  \0  \0  \0 002   A   F  \0  \0  \0 013   A
0000040   F   G   H   A   N   I   S   T   A   N 377 377 377 377  \0 003
0000060  \0  \0  \0 002   A   L  \0  \0  \0 007   A   L   B   A   N   I
0000100   A 377 377 377 377  \0 003  \0  \0  \0 002   D   Z  \0  \0  \0
0000120 007   A   L   G   E   R   I   A 377 377 377 377  \0 003  \0  \0
0000140  \0 002   Z   M  \0  \0  \0 006   Z   A   M   B   I   A 377 377
0000160 377 377  \0 003  \0  \0  \0 002   Z   W  \0  \0  \0  \b   Z   I
0000200   M   B   A   B   W   E 377 377 377 377 377 377

Compatibility

There is no COPY statement in the SQL standard.

The following syntax was used before PostgreSQL version 7.3 and is still supported:

COPY [ BINARY ] tablename [ WITH OIDS ]
    FROM { 'filename' | STDIN }
    [ [USING] DELIMITERS 'delimiter' ]
    [ WITH NULL AS 'null string' ]

COPY [ BINARY ] tablename [ WITH OIDS ]
    TO { 'filename' | STDOUT }
    [ [USING] DELIMITERS 'delimiter' ]
    [ WITH NULL AS 'null string' ]