Working with Drop Database in Postgres

Intro

The DROP DATABASE statement allows you to completely delete a database an all its contents. In this article, we will learn how to drop database in PostgreSQL.

The Syntax

The basic syntax of DROP DATABASE is as follows:

DROP DATABASE [dbname];

Getting Setup

We will be using docker in this article, but feel free to install your database locally instead. Once you have docker installed, create a new file called docker-compose.yml and add the following.

version: '3'
 
services:
  db:
    image: 'postgres:latest'
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: username
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
      POSTGRES_DB: default_database
    volumes:
      - psqldata:/var/lib/postgresql

  phpmyadmin:
    image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
    links:
      - db
    environment:
      PMA_HOST: db
      PMA_PORT: 3306
      PMA_ARBITRARY: 1
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8081:80

volumes:
  psqldata:

Next, run docker-compose up.

Now, navigate to http://localhost:8081/ to access phpMyAdmin. Then log in with the username root and pass root_pass.

Click the SQL tab and you are ready to go.

An Example

Let’s create a basic database for our workplace.

CREATE DATABASE workplace;

Now, we can check to make sure our database using the SHOW keyword.

SELECT datname FROM pg_database;

Next, let’s drop our database.

DROP DATABASE workplace;

We check to make sure our database is dropped by using SHOW again.

SELECT datname FROM pg_database;