Get the latest tech news

Why Pg_dump Is Amazing

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool? . In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that...

For instance, it's unlikely that a non-PostgreSQL system will be able to process unmodified pg_dump output without errors, but the great thing about SQL is that you can modify it yourself, with a text editor, or a script. (To be fair, some out-of-core backup solutions also offer selective dump and restore, but to my knowledge none of them are nearly as powerful as what you can do with pg_dump and pg_restore; further, they work by doing things which PostgreSQL itself would consider to be unsupported scenarios, so you really need to hope that the tool author is aware of all the risks.) This means there's no good way to identify a specific table or extract its contents from a physical backup, other than to start up the server with the appropriate configuration and let recovery sort things out.

Get the Android app