Postgres: Howto change owner for all tables

Just a small tip for today: when moving an RoR-application between servers the database user often changes. While it is easy to dump and restore database dums using pg_dump and pg_restore this might lead to invalid table ownerships on the new host.

I’m using the following bash snippet for fixing this problem

(just exchange $DATABASE and $NEW_OWNER" with the corresponding database and username, execute the following bash script as postgres user):

 $ for tbl in `psql -qAt -c "select tablename from pg_tables where schemaname = 'public';" $DATABASE` ; do  psql -c "alter table $tbl owner to $NEW_OWNER" $DATABASE ; done

If you tend to use this script more often encapsulate it in a quick-and-dirty bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# test that there are two arguments
if test $# -lt 2; then
  echo "usage: $0 <database> <new-owner>"
  exit 0
fi

database=$1
new_owner=$2
tables=`psql -qAt -c "select tablename from pg_tables where schemaname = 'public';" $database`

for tbl in $tables ; do
  psql -c "alter table $tbl owner to $new_owner" $database ;
done