IBM Cloud Docs
Understanding data portability for Databases for PostgreSQL

Understanding data portability for Databases for PostgreSQL

Data portabilityThe ability of a service or workload to recover from rare, major incidents and wide-scale failures, such as service disruption. This includes a physical disaster that affects an entire region, corruption of a database, or the loss of a service contributing to a workload. The impact exceeds the ability of the high availability design to handle it. involves a set of tools, and procedures that enable customers to export the digital artifacts that would be needed to implement similar workload and data processing on different service providers or on-prem software. It includes procedures for copying and storing the service customer's content, including the related configuration used by the service to store and process the data, on customer's own location.

Responsibilities

IBM Cloud® services provide interfaces and instructions to guide the customer to copy and store the service customer content, including the related configuration, on their own selected location.

The customer then is responsible for the use of the exported data and configuration for the purpose of data portability to other infrastructures. This can involve the following:

  • Planning and execution for setting up alternate infrastructure on on different cloud providers or on-prem software that provide similar capabilities to the IBM services.
  • Planning and execution for the porting of the required application code on the alternate infrastructure, including the adaptation of customer's application code, and deployment automation.
  • Conversion of the exported data and configuration to format required by the alternate infrastructure and adapted applications.

To find out more about responsibility ownership for using IBM Cloud products between IBM and customer see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud products.

Data export procedures

Databases for PostgreSQL provides mechanisms to export your content that has been uploaded, stored, and processed using the service.

Migrating data from Databases for PostgreSQL

You can use the following methods to export data from Databases for PostgreSQL.

Connect to your IBM Cloud® deployment:

To access your Databases for PostgreSQL deployment and its tools, follow the connection instructions provided in our documentation. Once connected, you'll have access to the psql and pg_dump commands. You can also use PGadmin to export data. For more information, see the Getting started page.

Ensure that you are connected to the deployment containing the database you want to export. Replace <<CRN>> with your actual Cloud Resource Name.

ibmcloud cdb cxn <<CRN>> -s

Using pg_dump

On your database run pg_dump to create an SQL file, which can be used to re-create the database. At a minimum, pg_dump takes a hostname (-h flag), port number (-p flag), database name (-d flag), username (-U flag), and a file (or directory name) to write the dump to (-f flag).

For example, the following command dumps the Databases for PostgreSQL "compose" database that is hosted on sl-eu-lon-2-portal.4.dblayer.com, port 17980, using the admin user and save the results in dump.sql.

pg_dump -h sl-eu-lon-2-portal.4.dblayer.com -p 17980 -d compose -U admin -f dump.sql

Further options:

The pg_dump command offers more capabilities. For a complete list of capabilites and a detailed explanation, see the pg_dump documentation and command reference. You can export specific parts of your database instead of the entire structure using the documented options.

Dumps can be generated as either script or archive files (use t option). Script dumps are plain-text SQL commands intended to be read with psql, while archive file dumps require pg_restore for reconstruction. Archive formats offer greater flexibility, allowing for selective restoration.

Additional migration option by using pg_restore

For TAR files containing separate SQL and data files, the pg_restore command provides a more flexible approach to database migration. An example of the pg_restore command is:

 PGPASSWORD=yourpasswordhere PGSSLROOTCERT=cert.crt pg_restore -h c7798cf6-e5d2-4513-b17f-3d3fa67d8291.8f7bfd8f3faa4218aec56e069eb46187.databases.appdomain.cloud -p 32484 -U admin -F t -d ibmclouddb tarfile.tar

Exported data formats

The exported data can be in plain text (sql) or archive files (tar), and based on the file formats, data can be migrated to any other Postgresql instance using either psql or pg_restore commands. To restore data from a TAR file, see the pg_restore documentation.

Data ownership

All exported data are classified as Customer content and therefore apply to them the full customer ownership and licensing rights, as stated in IBM Cloud® Service Agreement.