Re: Practical maximums (was Re: PostgreSQL theoretical

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Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 13:51, Ron Johnson wrote:
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>> Jeff Davis wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 09:53 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
>
>>> pg_dump just produces output. You could pretty easily stripe that output
>>> across multiple devices just by using some scripts. Just make sure to
>>> write a script that can reconstruct the data again when you need to
>>> restore.
>> But doesn't that mean that pg_dump must dump to disk?
>>
>> With a *big* database, that's a whole lot of extra kit (not just
>> spindles) to buy.
>
> I'm certain you can backup direct to tape, as I've done it in the past
> with postgresql. This was in the day of 4 gig 4 mm tape drives...

Sure. That's why tar is named *Tape* ARchive.

Going along with the example of the 4GB 4mm tape drive, and to
simplify, we are *not* using compression (neither on the drive or
s/w gzip or bzip):

Say we have a 7GB database. Is there a way to way to use 2 tape
drives... Argh, I guess not, since the Unix pipe mentality presumes
that the mode of operation will be:
$ pg_dump /some/database | tar cvfz /dev/st0/db.tgz

What would be darned useful (but only, I think, with heavy usage of
tablespaces) is:
$ pg_tapedump /some/database /dev/st0,/dev/st1,/dev/st2,/dev/st3

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

Is "common sense" really valid?
For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that
whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins
are mud people.
However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong.
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