HACKER Q&A
📣 polishdude20

Any good tools to pgdump multi tenant database?


Just joined a new company and they run a multi tenant database in postgres where each tenant is distinguished by their account ID. I'd like to be able to dump the data of a single account to my local instance to assist in debugging.

Problem is, many of the entities do not include an account ID. For example, a user can have an account ID but a user post will not but it will be tied to a user ID.

Also foreign keys aren't really implemented fully.

Are there any tools or techniques that could help make this process easier to do?

  👤 tudorg Accepted Answer ✓
You can try with data subsetting tools, a few that I know are: greenmask, jailer, tonic condenser, and I think there are more. They are not exactly for your use case, but might help you a bit. The problem is most of these tools can walk foreign keys, but only in one directions.

Also, since you said FK are not fully implemented, then there just won't be enough information for them to work with. So you can either work on fixing the foreign keys or have more complex scripts.

👤 abhisek
This is poor design. Multi-tenant data model design must have a tenant or segment ID for every tenant segmented tables. While it may not be a problem initially but as the business grows, you may need to move tenant data to separate DBs or even different regions based on compliance requirements. IMHO it is a good idea to run DB migrations and have a tenant ID populated in all tenant segmented tables