PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

Performing actions on many tables

As a database administrator, you will often need to apply multiple commands as part of the same overall task. That task could be one of the following:

• Many different actions on multiple tables
• The same action on multiple tables
• The same action on multiple tables in parallel
• Different actions—one on each table—in parallel

The first is a general case where you need to make a set of coordinated changes. The solution is "write a script", as we've already discussed. We can also call this static scripting because you write the script manually and then execute it.

The second type of task can be achieved very simply with dynamic scripts, where we write a script that writes another script. This technique is the main topic of ...