Re: Moving a tablespace

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Hyatt, Gordon
<Gordon(dot)Hyatt(at)joslin(dot)harvard(dot)edu> wrote:
> I want to move an existing tablespace on an FC8 box. I read (at
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/manage-ag-tablespaces.html)
> that one can simply stop the server, update the symbolic link in
> $PGDATA/pg_tblspc, start the server, then update the pg_tablespace
> catalog to point to the new location.
>
> Is this all there is to moving a tablespace? It seems too easy.
>
> The tablespace I want to move is only around 1GB in size so dropping and
> reloading during the next maintenance cycle is not that much of an
> issue; although, I'd prefer not to.

Couldn't you also create a new tablespace elsewhere, and use the SET
TABLESPACE subcommand of ALTER TABLE
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/sql-altertable.html) to
migrate all the appropriate tables?

Granted, it's not exactly the same as moving the tablespace, but
there's less manual updating of system catalogs and potentially less
downtime. I don't have a whole lot of experience with tablespaces so I
may be missing something, but that's something you might want to try
out.

Peter