grep - How to search a specific value in all tables (PostgreSQL)?

Question

Is it possible to search every column of every table for a particular value in PostgreSQL?

A similar question is available here for Oracle.

Answer 1

How about dumping the contents of the database, then using grep?

$ pg_dump --data-only --inserts -U postgres your-db-name > a.tmp
$ grep United a.tmp
INSERT INTO countries VALUES ('US', 'United States');
INSERT INTO countries VALUES ('GB', 'United Kingdom');

The same utility, pg_dump, can include column names in the output. Just change --inserts to --column-inserts. That way you can search for specific column names, too. But if I were looking for column names, I'd probably dump the schema instead of the data.

$ pg_dump --data-only --column-inserts -U postgres your-db-name > a.tmp
$ grep country_code a.tmp
INSERT INTO countries (iso_country_code, iso_country_name) VALUES ('US', 'United  States');
INSERT INTO countries (iso_country_code, iso_country_name) VALUES ('GB', 'United Kingdom');