Managing Odoo databases

We've seen how to create and initialize new Odoo databases from the command line. There are more commands worth knowing about for managing databases.

Although the Odoo server automatically takes care of managing databases, we can manually create PostgreSQL databases from the command line, using the following:

$ createdb MyDB

More interestingly, Odoo can also create a new database by copying an existing one, using the --template option. For this to work, the copied database can't have open connections to it, so make sure your Odoo instance is stopped and there is no other connection open for it. The command to use looks like this:

$ createdb --template=MyDB MyDB2

In fact, every time we create a database, a template is used. If none is specified, a predefined one called template1 is used.

To list the existing databases in your system, use the PostgreSQL psql utility with the -l option:

$ psql -l

Running the preceding command will list the databases we have created so far. If you followed the previous commands, you should see MyDB and MyDB2 listed . The list will also display the encoding used in each database. The default is UTF-8, which is the encoding needed for Odoo databases.

To remove a database you no longer need (or want to recreate), use the dropdb command:

$ dropdb MyDB2

Now, you know the basics to work with databases. To learn more about PostgreSQL, refer to the official documentation at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/.