Re: empty a database

Clinging to sanity, rasputnik(at)hellooperator(dot)net (Dick Davies) mumbled into her beard:
> Is there a neat way to clean out a database via SQL commands?
>
> i.e. get rid of tables, sequences, integers, etc.
>
> At present I'm using dropdb/createdb, but thats' far from ideal
> and I think it's causing postgres to do more mork than it needs to...

If you truly need for all of the objects to go away, dropping the
database seems like a reasonable way to do this. I'm not sure what
work you are imagining is "too much" or "unnecessary."

If you're regularly recreating a not-totally-empty database,
containing some set of "fresh" tables/sequences/views/such, then I'd
think you're doing the right thing, but need to take a further step...

If you're recreating a database that has some non-zero "initial
configuration," then what you might do is to set up a 'template'
database, let's call it "mytemplate" that contains that configuration.
Then you can do the following:

$ createdb --template=mytemplate mydatabase
CREATE DATABASE
$ do_some_work_with mydatabase
$ dropdb mydatabase
DROP DATABASE
$ createdb --template=mytemplate mydatabase
CREATE DATABASE
$ do_some_work_with mydatabase
$ dropdb mydatabase
DROP DATABASE
$ createdb --template=mytemplate mydatabase
CREATE DATABASE
$ do_some_work_with mydatabase
$ dropdb mydatabase
DROP DATABASE
$ createdb --template=mytemplate mydatabase
CREATE DATABASE
$ do_some_work_with mydatabase
$ dropdb mydatabase
DROP DATABASE
$ createdb --template=mytemplate mydatabase
CREATE DATABASE
$ do_some_work_with mydatabase
$ dropdb mydatabase
DROP DATABASE
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