Postgres - drop all public tables in schema

In this short article, we would like to show how to remove all public tables from the Postgres database.

The main idea of the solution in this article is to generate DROP TABLE ... queries for all public tables and call each query manually.

Steps:

1. Generate DROP TABLE ... queries calling database:

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SELECT 'DROP TABLE IF EXISTS "' || tablename || '" CASCADE;' 

FROM pg_tables

WHERE schemaname='public';

Example result:

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DROP TABLE IF EXISTS "tasks" CASCADE;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS "users" CASCADE;

Example screenshot:

2. Execute generated drop queries:

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DROP TABLE IF EXISTS "tasks" CASCADE;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS "users" CASCADE;

Example output:

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/* Affected rows: 0  Found rows: 0  Warnings: 0  Duration for 2 queries: 0.000 sec. (+ 0.010 sec. network) */