pgextract

pgextract is a command-line utility that loads or extracts large or small amounts of data from PostgreSQL in various formats.

Download

Get the binary for your platform from the releases page

Run

pgextract extract --url postgres://postgres:example@localhost  --format ndjson 'select * from t'   > out.ndjson

Rationale

Unlike many databases, the psql CLI only supports text, csv and proprietary binary input and input formats via the COPY command.

pgextract aims to fill this gap, by supporting input and output in common big data formats.

Performance

pgextract can do 200MB/s+, and its performance is almost always limited by how fast the PostgreSQL server can stream the data.

Supported formats

Right now pgextract only supports extracting data to NDJSON, but I plan to add relevant formats shortly.

Format	Load	Extract
Newline-delimited JSON	❌	✅