I was prowling StackOverflowtoday and the questionwas asked when you would use 2 databases. I’m amazed at the number of answers of replication and sharding (some under the guise of some other description). The only answer I can think of to be correct is Different Applications/Services (shared hosting probably falls under those 2 in a weird way). I’m going to explain why a replicated database and/or a sharded database are not multiple databases.

If you followed my last initial setuppost on creating users and are running a default install of postgres you currently should be able to access the database on your cli. However, many distributions do not install postgres in a default manner. A great many distributions make the default authentication for sockets ident sameuser. This is technically much more secure than trustwhich is the default. However, you may find yourself locked out of your database on the local cli if you make the database name different.