Hi, I have the same problem as Andreas Haumer did in this thread: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2008-01/msg00128.php -- I want to be able to easily (i.e. programmatically) copy a database from one place to another, changing the owners of all contained objects in the process. While I very much appreciate Tom Lane's fast and helpful responses to Andreas on that thread, it doesn't quite address my problem: there is no simple, automatable 1- or 2-step process that can accomplish this (without Andreas's (admittedly neat) trick of temporarily changing the destination user to superuser status). The best I've been able to do is hack up a Perl script that parses the output of pg_restore -l, directing superuser-requiring operations to one file and non-superuser-requiring operations to another; but afterwards the superuser-requiring operations still have to have the owners of the objects they produce manually reassigned. My instincts (which could be wrong...) tell me that this is actually a fairly common problem. So, I suggest the following enhancement to pg_restore: add a --map-users command-line option that accepts the name of a file containing two usernames on each line, <from> and <to>. Then (provided -O was not specified) when producing ALTER ... OWNER TO commands, simply replace every <from> user listed in this file with the corresponding <to> user. Another niggle is that the COMMENT ON DATABASE command, produced by pg_restore when run without the -d option, always refers to the name of the original database, which will cause an error if the new DB has a different name. It would be nice to have an option (or other means) to remedy this. It seems to me that these things would be pretty simple to implement and sufficiently general to tackle this problem neatly, without opening up any security holes (you would still need to be *some* DB superuser for the ALTER ... OWNER TO commands to work). Does this sound sensible? If Tom or another high-ranking PostgreSQLer okays it in principle, I suppose I could try developing a patch for pg_restore myself. (Never done this before but there's a first time for everything...) TIA, Tim White
