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CREATE TABLE – the fancy way with LIKE

05.2013 / Category: / Tags: |

How to create similar tables

One tiny little feature many users of PostgreSQL have often forgotten is the ability to create similar tables. It happens quite frequently that you want to create a table, which is just like some other one. To achieve that most people will do:

This works nicely, but what if you got 20 indexes and 50 default values around? Clearly, it can be painful to add all that later on.

But there is a better way!

We have created a simple table:

The LIKE keywords allows you to do a lot of fancy stuff . You can include constraints or just ignore them. You can include or just ignore defaults. The cool thing here is that you can include indexes: PostgreSQL will create synthetic index names for you – no need to create them all manually. This is how it works:

The result will be an empty table which has been created according to our specifications:

Using LIKE is especially useful if you want to clone tables which have dozens of indexes and constraints.

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