Re: Optional postgres database not so optional in 8.1

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:

>On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 12:01:31AM +1100, John Hansen wrote:
>
>
>>On a fresh installation of postgrsql 8.1 if you drop the
>>'postgres' database,
>>psql, createdb, etc. no longer works.
>>
>>psql -l; ignores -dtemplate1, and createdb doesn't have such an option.
>>
>>
>
>What distribution? I've never seen this "postgres" database you speak
>of. It certainly not on any systems I've used. Do you have a PGDATABASE
>variable in your environment?
>
>
>

The 8.1 release notes have this:

*

Make initdb create a new standard database called postgres, and
convert utilities to use postgres rather than template1 for
standard lookups (Dave)

In prior releases, template1 was used both as a default connection
for utilities like createuser, and as a template for new
databases. This caused CREATE DATABASE to sometimes fail, because
a new database cannot be created if anyone else is in the template
database. With this change, the default connection database is now
postgres, meaning it is much less likely someone will be using
template1 during CREATE DATABASE.

cheers

andrew