A common database task is a custom report from the console. This usually invovles a CSV file since it’s human readable and imports into Microsoft Excel. It’s very easy to do this in PostgreSql 8. Just use the copy directive like this:
COPY (select * from table_name) TO '/tmp/table_name.csv' WITH CSV HEADER;
For example, if I want to dump select * from yoda where state='jedi' to CSV, my SQL may look something like this:
COPY (select * from yoda where state='jedi') TO '/tmp/jedi.csv' WITH CSV HEADER;
