Creating and Managing Databases

Prerequisites

Only the database system administrator or users granted with database creation permissions can create a database. For details about how to grant database creation permissions to a user, see Managing Users and Their Permissions.

Background

• GaussDB has two default template databases template0 and template1 and a default user database postgres.
• CREATE DATABASE creates a database by copying a template database. Only template0 can be copied. Do not use a client or any other tools to connect to or to perform operations on the template databases.
  

  • The template database does not contain any user table. You can view the attributes of the template database in the PG_DATABASE system catalog.
  • The template0 template database does not allow user connections. Only the initial user and the system administrator of the database can connect to template1.
• A database system consists of multiple databases. A client can connect to only one database at a time. Currently, cross-database query or cross-database transaction is not supported.
• If multiple databases exist in the database cluster, you can use the -d parameter of the client tool to specify the target database for login. Alternatively, you can run the \c command to switch the database after the client program logs in to the database.

Precautions

Assume that the database encoding is SQL_ASCII. (You can run the show server_encoding command to query the encoding used for storing data in the current database.) If the database object name contains multi-byte characters (such as Chinese) or if the object name length exceeds the allowed maximum (63 bytes), the database truncates the last byte (not the last character) of the object name. In this case, half characters may appear.

To resolve this problem, you need to:

• Ensure that the name of the data object does not exceed the maximum length.
• Use a proper coded character set, such as UTF-8, as the default database storage code set (server_encoding).
• Exclude multi-byte characters from object names.
• If you fail to delete an object by specifying its name after truncation, specify its original name to delete it, or manually delete it from the system catalogs on each node.

Procedure

1. Run the following command to create a database named db_tpcds:

   1 2	openGauss=# CREATE DATABASE db_tpcds; CREATE DATABASE

   

   • Database names must comply with the general naming convention rules of SQL identifiers. The current role automatically becomes the owner of this new database.
   • If a database system is used to support independent users and projects, store them in different databases.
   • If the projects or users are associated with each other and share resources, store them in one database. However, you can divide them into different schemas. A schema is a logical structure, and the access permission for a schema is controlled by the permission system module.
   • A database name contains a maximum of 63 bytes and the excessive bytes at the end of the name will be truncated by the server. You are advised to specify a database name no longer than 63 bytes when you create a database.

2. View databases.
   • Run the \l meta-command to view the database list of the database system.

     1	openGauss=# \l

   • Run the following command to query the database list in the pg_database system catalog:

     1	openGauss=# SELECT datname FROM pg_database;

3. Modify the database.

   You can modify database configuration such as the database owner, name, and default settings.

   • Run the following command to rename the database:

     1 2	openGauss=# ALTER DATABASE db_tpcds RENAME TO human_tpcds; ALTER DATABASE

   

   After setting the parameters, you need to manually run the CLEAN CONNECTION command to clear the old connections. Otherwise, the parameter values between nodes may be inconsistent.

4. Delete a database.

   You can run the DROP DATABASE command to delete a database. This command deletes the system directory in the database, as well as the database directory on the disk that stores data. Only the database owner or system administrator can delete a database. A database accessed by users cannot be deleted. You need to connect to another database before deleting this database.

   Run the following command to delete the database:

   1 2	openGauss=# DROP DATABASE human_tpcds; DROP DATABASE