Ask HN: Any good tools to pgdump multi tenant database? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any good tools to pgdump multi tenant database?

3 pointspolishdude205 comments

Just joined a new company and they run a multi tenant database in postgres where each tenant is distinguished by their account ID. I'd like to be able to dump the data of a single account to my local instance to assist in debugging.

Problem is, many of the entities do not include an account ID. For example, a user can have an account ID but a user post will not but it will be tied to a user ID.

Also foreign keys aren't really implemented fully.

Are there any tools or techniques that could help make this process easier to do?

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You can try with data subsetting tools, a few that I know are: greenmask, jailer, tonic condenser, and I think there are more. They are not exactly for your use case, but might help you a bit. The problem is most of these tools can walk foreign keys, but only in one directions.

Also, since you said FK are not fully implemented, then there just won't be enough information for them to work with. So you can either work on fixing the foreign keys or have more complex scripts.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Yeah due to the unavailability of FK's, I'd have to somehow map certain ID columns to the tables they're for, accounting for slight naming convention differences.

In case you don’t have FKs you could specify virtual foreign keys in Greenmask.

Check out docs for details

https://docs.greenmask.io/latest/database_subset/#virtual-re...

This is poor design. Multi-tenant data model design must have a tenant or segment ID for every tenant segmented tables. While it may not be a problem initially but as the business grows, you may need to move tenant data to separate DBs or even different regions based on compliance requirements. IMHO it is a good idea to run DB migrations and have a tenant ID populated in all tenant segmented tables

Oh yes I agree with you. It may become a big push to convince my org to do that

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