The postgres extension allows DuckDB to directly read and write data from a running Postgres database instance. The data can be queried directly from the underlying Postgres database. Data can be loaded from Postgres tables into DuckDB tables, or vice versa.See the official announcement for implementation details and background.

Installing and Loading

To install the postgres extension, run:

INSTALL postgres;

The extension is loaded automatically upon first use. If you prefer to load it manually, run:

LOAD postgres;

Usage

To make a PostgreSQL database accessible to DuckDB, use the ATTACH command:

-- connect to the "public" schema of the postgres instance running on localhost
ATTACH '' AS postgres_db (TYPE postgres);
-- connect to the Postgres instance with the given parameters
ATTACH 'dbname=postgres user=postgres host=127.0.0.1' AS db (TYPE postgres);

The ATTACH command takes as input a libpq connection string - which is a set of key=value pairs separated by spaces. Below are some example connection strings and commonly used parameters. A full list of available parameters can be found in the Postgres documentation.

dbname=postgresscanner
host=localhost port=5432 dbname=mydb connect_timeout=10

The tables in the file can be read as if they were normal DuckDB tables, but the underlying data is read directly from Postgres at query time.

D SHOW TABLES;
┌───────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 name                  │
│                varchar                │
├───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ uuids                                 │
└───────────────────────────────────────┘
D SELECT * FROM uuids;
┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│                  u                   │
│                 uuid                 │
├──────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 6d3d2541-710b-4bde-b3af-4711738636bf │
│ NULL                                 │
│ 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001 │
│ ffffffff-ffff-ffff-ffff-ffffffffffff │
└──────────────────────────────────────┘

It might be desirable to create a copy of the Postgres databases in DuckDB to prevent the system from re-reading the tables from Postgres continuously, particularly for large tables.

Data can be copied over from Postgres to DuckDB using standard SQL, for example:

CREATE TABLE duckdb_table AS FROM postgres_db.postgres_tbl;

Writing Data to Postgres

In addition to reading data from Postgres, the extension allows you to create tables, ingest data into Postgres and make other modifications to a Postgres database using standard SQL queries.

This allows you to use DuckDB to, for example, export data that is stored in a Postgres database to Parquet, or read data from a Parquet file into Postgres.

Below is a brief example of how to create a new table in Postgres and load data into it.

ATTACH 'dbname=postgresscanner' AS postgres_db (TYPE postgres);
CREATE TABLE postgres_db.tbl(id INTEGER, name VARCHAR);
INSERT INTO postgres_db.tbl VALUES (42, 'DuckDB');

Many operations on Postgres tables are supported. All these operations directly modify the Postgres database, and the result of subsequent operations can then be read using Postgres. Note that if modifications are not desired, ATTACH can be run with the READ_ONLY property which prevents making modifications to the underlying database. For example:

ATTACH 'dbname=postgresscanner' AS postgres_db (TYPE postgres, READ_ONLY);

Below is a list of supported operations.

CREATE TABLE

CREATE TABLE postgres_db.tbl(id INTEGER, name VARCHAR);

INSERT INTO

INSERT INTO postgres_db.tbl VALUES (42, 'DuckDB');

SELECT

SELECT * FROM postgres_db.tbl;
┌───────┬─────────┐
│  id   │  name   │
│ int64 │ varchar │
├───────┼─────────┤
│    42 │ DuckDB  │
└───────┴─────────┘

COPY

COPY postgres_db.tbl TO 'data.parquet';
COPY postgres_db.tbl FROM 'data.parquet';

UPDATE

UPDATE postgres_db.tbl SET name='Woohoo' WHERE id=42;

DELETE

DELETE FROM postgres_db.tbl WHERE id=42;

ALTER TABLE

ALTER TABLE postgres_db.tbl ADD COLUMN k INTEGER;

DROP TABLE

DROP TABLE postgres_db.tbl;

CREATE VIEW

CREATE VIEW postgres_db.v1 AS SELECT 42;

CREATE SCHEMA/DROP SCHEMA

CREATE SCHEMA postgres_db.s1;
CREATE TABLE postgres_db.s1.integers(i int);
INSERT INTO postgres_db.s1.integers VALUES (42);
SELECT * FROM postgres_db.s1.integers;
┌───────┐
│   i   │
│ int32 │
├───────┤
│    42 │
└───────┘
DROP SCHEMA postgres_db.s1;

Transactions

CREATE TABLE postgres_db.tmp(i INTEGER);
BEGIN;
INSERT INTO postgres_db.tmp VALUES (42);
SELECT * FROM postgres_db.tmp;
┌───────┐
│   i   │
│ int64 │
├───────┤
│    42 │
└───────┘
ROLLBACK;
SELECT * FROM postgres_db.tmp;
┌────────┐
│   i    │
│ int64  │
├────────┤
│ 0 rows │
└────────┘

Running SQL Queries in Postgres with postgres_query

The postgres_query function allows you to run arbitrary SQL within an attached database. postgres_query takes the name of the atached Postgres database to execute the query in, as well as the SQL query to execute. The result of the query is returned.

postgres_query(attached_database::VARCHAR, query::VARCHAR)

Example

ATTACH 'dbname=postgresscanner' AS s (TYPE POSTGRES);
SELECT * FROM postgres_query('s', 'SELECT * FROM cars LIMIT 3');
┌──────────────┬───────────┬─────────┐
│    brand     │   model   │  color  │
│   varchar    │  varchar  │ varchar │
├──────────────┼───────────┼─────────┤
│ ferari       │ testarosa │ red     │
│ aston martin │ db2       │ blue    │
│ bentley      │ mulsanne  │ gray    │
└──────────────┴───────────┴─────────┘

Settings

The extension exposes the following configuration parameters.

Schema Cache

To avoid having to continuously fetch schema data from Postgres, DuckDB keeps schema information - such as the names of tables, their columns, etc - cached. If changes are made to the schema through a different connection to the Postgres instance, such as new columns being added to a table, the cached schema information might be outdated. In this case, the function pg_clear_cache can be executed to clear the internal caches.

CALL pg_clear_cache();

The old postgres_attach function is deprecated. It is recommended to switch over to the new ATTACH syntax.

GitHub Repository

GitHub