Folks,
There's no time to do this for 8.1, but I'd like to get it on the books for
8.2:
The Problem: Occassionally a DBA needs to dump a database to a new
encoding. In instances where the current encoding, (or lack of an
encoding, like SQL_ASCII) is poorly supported on the target database
server, it can be useful to dump into a particular encoding. But,
currently the only way to set the encoding of a pg_dump file is to change
client_encoding in postgresql.conf and restart postmaster. This is more
than a little awkward for production systems.
The TODO: add an --encoding=[encoding name] option to pg_dump. This would
set client_encoding for pg_dump's session(s).
--
--Josh
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco