Prepare the environment for the pnfs tools as usual:

[root] # . /usr/etc/pnfsSetup
[root] # PATH=${pnfs}/tools:$PATH

Note that you have to do this now even if you did it before because the content of /usr/etc/pnfsSetup changed.

The conversion of the GDBM file <backupDir>/databases/<gdbmFile> is done with the following command:

[root] # gdbm2psql -r -o -i <backupDir>/databases/<gdbmFile>

It is necessary to use the full path to the file. A new database in the PostgreSQL server will be created and the data from the GDBM file will be written into it. A typical output is

Connection string: dbname=template1 user=pnfsserver
Connection string: dbname=admin user=pnfsserver
WARNING:  there is no transaction in progress
Put record #1 into the database...time=0
key 000000000000xxxxxxxxxxxx is found at 1310
There are 3671 records in the database.

The conversion script also takes a bit of time, but is fairly quick. In fact, you may exceed PostgreSQL’s checkpointing capability, in which case edit the <database_directory_name>/data/postgresql.conf file and increase the number of checkpoint_segments (for example from 3 to 10).

To speed up the conversion the program does not create the database key, so you have to do it in a separate step. For each database created during the conversion run

[root] # psql -U pnfsserver -c 'ALTER TABLE pnfs ADD primary key (pnfsid)' <dbName>

(or use the script ${pnfs}/tools/make-key.sh). This also can take a while if the files were large.