How to create Postgres regression test database

Question

The Postgres documentation for the EXPLAIN command states that

Examples in this section are drawn from the regression test database after doing a VACUUM ANALYZE, using 9.3 development sources. You should be able to get similar results if you try the examples yourself (...)

How do I set up the regression test database?

Answer 1

The documentation is here.

You ./configure and make install the PostgreSQL software, then create a database cluster with initdb.

Then you set PGPORT and PGUSER (if you want something nonstandard) and run

make installcheck

for the regular test suite or

make installcheck-world

for the extended test suite.

After that, you'll have a new database called regression with all kinds of objects created by the tests, which can be useful for testing.