Re: pg_dumpall forces plain text format

Andrew Kohlsmith <akohlsmith(at)mixdown(dot)org> writes:
> Is there a way to start a transaction at the start of
> the dump and hold it throughout successive connections, finally releasing it
> at the end?

No, and since one backend can only talk to one database, I don't foresee
that changing.

> Or is that on the TODO for whenever foreign keys can be across databases?

I very seriously doubt that PG will *ever* support foreign keys across
databases.

The current development direction is not to improve communication across
databases, but to support schemas and improve privilege checking so that
users can more usefully be assigned separate schemas within a single
database. I think that multiple databases in a cluster will eventually
be used only for the cases where you *want* airtight separation between
two collections of data.

Hence, I'm not particularly concerned by complaints about lack of
cross-database functionality --- the folks who think they want that
actually want cross-schema operations, which will work fine in 7.3.

regards, tom lane