Every once in a while, you find yourself in a situation where you need to migrate data from one PostgreSQL database instance to another. Whether it’s 10 gigabytes or 1,000 gigabytes, being able to execute the dump/restore process as quickly as possible is always desirable.
In this talk, we’ll go through a handful of steps that’ll minimize the amount of time it takes to dump the contents of a local PostgreSQL database instance and restore it to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. First, we’ll walk through the process of exporting the contents of a local PostgreSQL instance with pg_dump. Then, we’ll go over a variety of EC2 and RDS specific tweaks. Finally, we’ll use pg_restore to load it into the target PostgreSQL RDS database as quickly and efficiently as possible.