Plulling a sample of your database - Postgresql

Question

we have a semi-large database that takes a long time to import locally on our individual dev machines. I was wondering if there were any tools that could connect to a database, do a little analysis and pull a sample of the database while keeping all the relations via a passed in parameter. Something like pg_sample --rough_size 1000 --dbhost mydbhost --dbuname uname --dbpword pword this creates a dump that i can import into my database for testing and development. But won't take 45 minutes to do it.

Thanks

Answer 1

I wrote such a tool: https://github.com/mla/pg_sample

From the README:

pg_sample is a utility for exporting a small, sample dataset from a larger PostgreSQL database. The output and command-line options closely resemble the pg_dump backup utility (although only the plain-text format is supported).

The sample database produced includes all tables from the original, maintains referential integrity, and supports circular dependencies.