Re: Some additions to pg_filedump...

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Darren Reed wrote:
>
>
>> I saw this, but when I went in search of activity, there was nothing.
>>
>> Look in:
>> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/rhdb/
>> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/rhdb-announce/
>> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/rhdb-cvs/
>>
>> All of the archives for 2008 are empty...
>>
>> It looks like "PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition Project" is a defunct
>> project.
>>
>
> Perhaps it would be apropos for RedHat to donate pg_filedump under BSD
> license so we could include it in contrib? It's not like they're
> getting much benefit of it being under GPL.
>

Whether or not that was a hint, I sat down and wrote a program from scratch
to try and dump out only the data files. I suppose this might be a
version 1.0.

http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~avalon/pg_dumpdata.tgz

Alas, there is a catch...

I couldn't work out the binary format for all of the data types - as an
exercise
I tried to reverse engineer their behaviour from examining what got
stored and
for most of the simple types, I think I've got it right. I couldn't
fathom "time";
the geometric ones I couldn't easily find examples of how to insert data
- I am
assuming the web documentation is self explanatory to those who use it;
"double"
wasn't a straight fit of "double' from unix (huh?) and "bit" wants a
length to work
which was against what I was trying to achieve.

It might be interesting to write something that tries to deconstruct the
index files,
but to me there's no value in that - the value is in the data.

Cheers,
Darren