Re: PG_RESTORE and database size

"Marcus Couto" <marcus_couto(at)hotmail(dot)com> writes:
> Here's a basic question. On working with backing up and restoring it =
> seems like if I keep on doing it in a row, the backup file size keeps on =
> increasing in size. It almost doubles in size for every backup/restore. =
> I want the restore the backup to overwrite the database and not add to =
> it. Is there another procedure I'm missing or a parameter I'm not using =
> right with pg_restore and pg_dump?

Why are you restoring into a live database? It sounds to me like you
are probably ignoring a lot of object-already-exists errors from
pg_restore and then having it add on duplicate data to the tables.

Usually people drop the database and recreate it empty before running
pg_restore. There is a switch named --clean or something like that
to make pg_restore emit DROP commands before recreating objects, but
hardly anyone uses it because it's usually slower than dropping the
whole database at once.

regards, tom lane