Re: [PATCH] pg_dump: Do not dump statistics for excluded tables

Rian McGuire <rian(dot)mcguire(at)buildkite(dot)com> writes:
> I've attached a patch against master that addresses a small bug in pg_dump.
> Previously, pg_dump would include CREATE STATISTICS statements for
> tables that were excluded from the dump, causing reload to fail if any
> excluded tables had extended statistics.

I agree that's a bug ...

> The patch skips the creation of the StatsExtInfo if the associated
> table does not have the DUMP_COMPONENT_DEFINITION flag set. This is
> similar to how getPublicationTables behaves if a table is excluded.

... but I don't like the details of this patch (and I'm not too
thrilled with the implementation of getPublicationTables, either).
The style in pg_dump is to put such decisions into separate
policy-setting subroutines. Also, skipping creation of the
DumpableObject altogether is the wrong thing because it'd prevent
pg_dump from tracing or reasoning about dependencies involving the
stats object, which can be relevant even if the object itself isn't
dumped --- this is why all the other data-collection subroutines
operate as they do. getPublicationTables can probably get away
with its low-rent approach given that publication membership isn't
represented by pg_depend entries, but it's far from clear that it'll
never be an issue for stats.

So I think it needs to be more like the attached.
(I did use your test case verbatim.)

regards, tom lane