Re: Database restore speed

* Luke Lonergan (LLonergan(at)greenplum(dot)com) wrote:
> > Luke, would it help to have one machine read the file and
> > have it connect to postgres on a different machine when doing
> > the copy? (I'm thinking that the first machine may be able to
> > do a lot of the parseing and conversion, leaving the second
> > machine to just worry about doing the writes)
>
> Unfortunately not - the parsing / conversion core is in the backend,
> where it should be IMO because of the need to do the attribute
> conversion there in the machine-native representation of the attributes
> (int4, float, etc) in addition to having the backend convert from client
> encoding (like LATIN1) to the backend encoding (like UNICODE aka UTF8).

Just a thought, but couldn't psql be made to use the binary mode of
libpq and do at least some of the conversion on the client side? Or
does binary mode not work with copy (that wouldn't suprise me, but
perhaps copy could be made to support it)?

The other thought, of course, is that you could use PITR for your
backups instead of pgdump...

Thanks,

Stephen