Creating a foreign table

The last step in initializing foreign data access is the creation of the foreign table itself. While doing so, we are limited to specifying column names, types, default values, and whether or not each column is nullable. This table skeleton helps the PostgreSQL query planner interact with the remote data as efficiently as possible.

In this recipe, we will create a foreign table and make it ready for use by our mapped user.

Getting ready

As we will be using a foreign server and a user mapping in this recipe, please follow all the previous recipes before proceeding.

How to do it...

For this recipe, we will perform all actions on the pg-report PostgreSQL server in the pgbench database. Follow these steps to create a table in pg-report, which refers to a table on pg-primary within pgbench:

1. Create a user mapping for the postgres user with this SQL statement:

   CREATE USER MAPPING FOR postgres
       SERVER primary_db
       OPTIONS (user 'postgres');

2. Drop the existing pgbench_accounts...