How it works...

These features, apart from the Change master password screen, run PostgreSQL administration commands on the server and report back through the web interface.

The master password is a very important piece of information that only lives in the Odoo server configuration file and is never stored in the database. There used to be a default value of admin, but using this value is a security liability as it is well known. In Odoo v9 and later, this is identified as an "unset" master password, and you are urged to change it when accessing the database administration interface. Even if it is stored in the configuration file under the admin_passwd entry, this is not the same as the password of the admin user; these are two independent passwords; the master password is set for an Odoo server process, which itself can handle multiple database instances, each of which has an independent admin user with his own password.

Security considerations: Remember that we are considering a development environment in this chapter. The Odoo database management interface is something that needs to be secured when you are working on a production server, as it gives access to a lot of sensitive information, especially if the server hosts Odoo instances for several different clients. This will be covered in Chapter 3, Server Deployment.

To create a new database, Odoo uses the PostgreSQL createdb utility and calls the internal Odoo function to initialize the new database in the same way as when you start Odoo on an empty database.

To duplicate a database, Odoo uses the --template option of createdb, passing the original database as an argument. This essentially duplicates the structure of the template database in the new database using internal and optimized PostgreSQL routines, which is much faster than creating a backup and restoring it (especially when using the web interface that requires downloading the backup file and uploading it again).

Backup and restore operations use the pg_dump and pg_restore utilities, respectively. When using the zip format, the backup will also include a copy of the file store that contains a copy of the documents when you configure Odoo to not keep these in the database, which is the default in 11.0. Unless you configure it otherwise, these files live in ~/.local/share/Odoo/filestore.

If the backup gets large, downloading it may fail, either because the Odoo server itself is not able to handle the large file in memory or the server runs behind a reverse proxy (refer to Chapter 3, Server Deployment) because there is a limit to the size of HTTP responses set in the proxy. Conversely, for the same reasons, you will likely experience issues with the database restore operation. When you start running into these issues, it is time to invest in a more robust external backup solution.