How to implement online schema change in PostgreSQL with Python?

Online schema changes in PostgreSQL allow you to modify a table’s schema while keeping it available for reads and writes. There are several third-party tools available for implementing online schema changes, such as pg_repack and pglogical. These tools provide easy-to-use interfaces for performing online schema changes, but may require some additional setup and configuration.

If you want to implement online schema changes in PostgreSQL with Python, you can use the psycopg2 library to execute SQL commands and the pg8000 library for handling database connections.

Here are the general steps for implementing online schema changes in PostgreSQL with Python:

  1. Create a new table with the desired schema using the CREATE TABLE command.
  2. Use the INSERT INTO command to copy data from the old table into the new table.
  3. Use the ALTER TABLE command to rename the old table to a backup name, and then rename the new table to the original table name.
  4. Use the DROP TABLE command to drop the backup table.

Here is some sample Python code that implements these steps:

Note that this code is just a simple example, and may need to be modified depending on your specific schema change requirements. It is also important to test any schema changes on a non-production database before applying them to a production system.

About Shiv Iyer 157 Articles
Open Source Database Systems Engineer with a deep understanding of Optimizer Internals, Performance Engineering, Scalability and Data SRE. Shiv currently is the Founder, Investor, Board Member and CEO of multiple Database Systems Infrastructure Operations companies in the Transaction Processing Computing and ColumnStores ecosystem. He is also a frequent speaker in open source software conferences globally.