Re: Practical maximums (was Re: PostgreSQL theoretical

On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 09:53 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:

> > The evasive answer is that you probably don't run regular full pg_dump
> > on such databases.
>
> Hmmm.
>

You might want to use PITR for incremental backup or maintain a standby
system using Slony-I ( www.slony.info ).

> >> Are there any plans of making a multi-threaded, or even
> >> multi-process pg_dump?
> >
> > What do you hope to accomplish by that? pg_dump is not CPU bound.
>
> Write to multiple tape drives at the same time, thereby reducing the
> total wall time of the backup process.

pg_dump just produces output. You could pretty easily stripe that output
across multiple devices just by using some scripts. Just make sure to
write a script that can reconstruct the data again when you need to
restore. You don't need multi-threaded pg_dump, you just need to use a
script that produces multiple output streams. Multi-threaded design is
only useful for CPU-bound applications.

Doing full backups of that much data is always a challenge, and I don't
think PostgreSQL has limitations that another database doesn't.

Regards,
Jeff Davis