How to import CSV file data into a PostgreSQL table?

Question

How can I write a stored procedure that imports data from a CSV file and populates the table?

Answer 1

One quick way of doing this is with the Python pandas library (version 0.15 or above works best). This will handle creating the columns for you - although obviously the choices it makes for data types might not be what you want. If it doesn't quite do what you want you can always use the 'create table' code generated as a template.

Here's a simple example:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('mypath.csv')
df.columns = [c.lower() for c in df.columns] #postgres doesn't like capitals or spaces

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
engine = create_engine('postgresql://username:password@localhost:5432/dbname')

df.to_sql("my_table_name", engine)

And here's some code that shows you how to set various options:

# Set it so the raw sql output is logged
import logging
logging.basicConfig()
logging.getLogger('sqlalchemy.engine').setLevel(logging.INFO)

df.to_sql("my_table_name2", 
          engine, 
          if_exists="append",  #options are ‘fail’, ‘replace’, ‘append’, default ‘fail’
          index=False, #Do not output the index of the dataframe
          dtype={'col1': sqlalchemy.types.NUMERIC,
                 'col2': sqlalchemy.types.String}) #Datatypes should be [sqlalchemy types][1]