Postgres copy data between tables

Specify the column names you are inserting, but do not use values when defining the select.

insert into table2(a,d,b,c) select a, d, b, c  from table1

You can copy data between tables in postgreSQL by using:

INSERT INTO [Tablename]([columns]) SELECT [Columns] FROM [Table to copy form];

Which in your case would look like:

INSERT INTO table2(a,b,c,d) SELECT a,b,c,d FROM table1;

You can also easily create an empty table with the same table structure so that copying to it is easy, by using the command:

CREATE TABLE [New Table] AS [Old Table] WITH NO DATA;

And then running the INSERT command from before.

If you simply want an identical copy you can run: CREATE TABLE [New Table] as [Old Table];

You can read more about copying data between tables in this article which I wrote for dataschool: https://dataschool.com/learn/copying-data-between-tables

You can read more about the insert command in the documentation here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/sql-insert.html