Re: Comparing two PostgreSQL databases -- order of pg_dump output

On tis, 2011-08-30 at 18:07 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Joe Abbate <jma(at)freedomcircle(dot)com> writes:
> > In order to compare the schema of two presumably identical databases,
> > I've been diffing the output of pg_dump -Osx. However, I've found that
> > the order of the output is not very reliable.
>
> Yeah, we've been around on that before. pg_dump does actually sort the
> output items (modulo dependency requirements), but it sorts by the same
> "tag" values that are printed by pg_restore -l, and those aren't currently
> designed to be unique. It's not too clear if we could get away with
> changing the definitions of the tag strings.

It's a bit strange that the tag for a trigger is "name" but the tag for
the trigger's comment is "name ON table". Not having the table name in
the trigger tag sounds wrong, because it makes the tag not very useful
for selecting the trigger from the TOC.