Question

I’ve been using JDBC with a local Postgres DB to copy data from CSV files into the database with the Postgres COPY command. I use Java to parse the existing CSV file into a CSV format matches the tables in the DB. I then save this parsed CSV to my local disk. I then have JDBC execute a COPY command using the parsed CSV to my local DB. Everything works as expected.
Now I’m trying to perform the same process on a Postgres DB on a remote server using JDBC. However, when JDBC tries to execute the COPY I get

org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: could not open file "C:\data\datafile.csv" for reading: No such file or directory

Am I correct in understanding that the COPY command tells the DB to look locally for this file? I.E. the remote server is looking on its C: drive (doesn’t exist).

If this is the case, is there anyway to indicate to the copy command to look on my computer rather than “locally” on the remote machine? Reading through the copy documentation I didn’t find anything that indicated this functionality.

If the functionality doesn’t exist, I’m thinking of just populating the whole database locally then copying to database to the remote server but just wanted to check that I wasn’t missing anything.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

If you use JDBC, the best solution for you is to use the PostgreSQL COPY API
http://jdbc.postgresql.org/documentation/publicapi/org/postgresql/copy/CopyManager.html

Otherwise (as already noted by others) you can use \copy from psql which allows accessing the local files on the client machine