Hi Jonathan,

If you use the XQuery function db:copy, an existing database will
simply be overwritten. The much older COPY command should by all means
behave identically, so I’ve just updated to BaseX to make this happen
[1,2]. You can use the command XQUERY db:copy('old', 'new') if you
don’t want to wait for BaseX 9.7 (but it should only be a few days
from now).

Best,
Christian

[1] https://files.basex.org/releases/latest/
[2] https://docs.basex.org/wiki/Commands#COPY


On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 9:38 PM Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What's the easiest way to copy a database, whether or not there is an existing copy with a given name?
>
> If I load a database with CREATE DB, it replaces any existing database with the same name.
>
> I would like to do the same with COPY DB, but it raises an error if there is a database with the same name.  And DELETE DB raises an error if there isn't a database with that name.  So what's the right way to do this?
>
> Jonathan