Run programs within the bin folder

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 22:56 -0700, pd wrote:

guys,

is there a way to run various programs like (pg_config, pg_restore,
dropdb etc) from within pgadmin or from within my java code. i mean can
i perform database administration from within postgres that is without
using literal commands. so from within my java code i can execute a
query like select all etc. but can i also execute a query which will
perform database administration.

i mean when my java code says "select all" it doesnt have psql in front
of it. so why when i have to backup or do anything else i need to use
pg_dump and not a general query (which really makes things very
complicate programmatically).

First of all, some administration can be easily performed with queries,
such as CREATE DATABASE, DROP DATABASE, CREATE LANGUAGE, etc.

To work with something like pg_dump, just open a pipe. Generally you
want to output to a file anyway. It would be odd to have something like
a pg_dump api call that dumped information out as a Java string. If
nothing else, you might not be able to store the entire string in
memory, so the interface of unix pipes is much better.

Regards,
Jeff Davis