use COPY TO on normalized database

Started by Acmover 18 years ago2 messagesgeneral
Jump to latest
#1Acm
alextabone@gmail.com

I am working with PostgreSQL 8.2.4.

I need to use the SQL COPY (COPY table FROM file) statement to
populate my database.

I have created a normalized data model (up to 3NF). Is it possible to
use COPY TO on a particular table (that is linked to other tables
using foreign keys) whilst keeping the foreign keys and other tables
updated?

(Also, will de-normalizing the model to 2NF or 1NF help?)

Thank you.

#2Sean Davis
sdavis2@mail.nih.gov
In reply to: Acm (#1)
Re: use COPY TO on normalized database

Acm wrote:

I am working with PostgreSQL 8.2.4.

I need to use the SQL COPY (COPY table FROM file) statement to
populate my database.

I have created a normalized data model (up to 3NF). Is it possible to
use COPY TO on a particular table (that is linked to other tables
using foreign keys) whilst keeping the foreign keys and other tables
updated?

(Also, will de-normalizing the model to 2NF or 1NF help?)

Thank you.

Use copy...from to load your data into a temp table. Then, do your data
manipulation in the database using insert into .... or other statements
to get data into the "real" 3NF tables. If you do all of this within a
transaction, if anything breaks, you can rollback and have no problems
with data integrity.

Sean