Formatting with psql

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:18:17 +0000

Yes, this is yet another "reminder to myself" Postgres post, because I've had to look this up at least 3 times.

To turn on expanded query output formatting in psql, the Postgres command-line client, run either \pset expanded or simply \x. They both do the same thing - make Postgres output each column in a result set as a separate line. This is equivalent to the mysql command-line client trick of ending the query with \G instead of a semi-colon.

Incidentally both of the above commands are boolean toggles. You run them once to turn on expanded formatting and run them again to turn it off.

Timestamps in PostgreSQL

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:00:23 +0000

So at my new job (maybe I'll post something about that later), we use PostgreSQL for our RDBMS. And, for reasons I won't get into, our application stores dates as UNIX timestamps, rather than, you know, actual dates. Thus this quick note to myself so I don't have to keep looking up how to convert between the two.

Date to UNIX timestamp in Postgres (from this page):
select date_part('epoch',now()) as unixtime; -- This will do it. select extract('epoch' from now()) as unixtime; -- ... and so will this.

UNIX timestamp to Postgres TIMESTAMP (from this page):
SELECT TIMESTAMP 'epoch' + 1195374767 * INTERVAL '1 second';

LinLog

Formatting with psql

Timestamps in PostgreSQL