Re: pg_dump performance lossage for primary keys

On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 03:34:51PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Philip Warner <pjw(at)rhyme(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>
> > We really need ALTER TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT for PK.
>
> That would be a cleaner way to do it, all right ... but for now, you can
> just reach in and set the indisprimary flag in pg_index after creating
> the index. I'm visualizing
>
<snip>
>
> On the other hand, that would fall over if executed by a non-superuser.
> Drat. Okay, I guess we just have to leave this as a TODO item for now.

This is one of those 'dual roles of pg_dump' problems: Philip has been
slowly migrating it from being a 'quickest possible backup dump' tool
to a 'recover my db in as human friendly (and SQL standards compliant)
a format as possible' tool. Which, not coincidently, has dramatically
reduced the version fragility of the dump output.

Adding implementation specific performance hacks back in is probably
a necessary evil, but should probably be protected by a '--fastdump'
switch or some such.

Ross