Re: pg_dumpall

On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Greg Smith wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> There isn't any good way to guarantee time coherence of dumps
>> across two databases.
>
> Whether there's a good way depends on what you're already doing.
> If you're going to the trouble of making a backup using PITR
> anyway, it's not hard to stop applying new logs to that replica and
> dump from it to get a point in time backup across all the
> databases. That's kind of painful now because you have to start
> the server to run pg_dumpall, so resuming recovery is difficult,
> but you can play filesystem tricks to make that easier.

Actually, this exact scenario brings up a question I was thinking of
last night. If you stop a PITR standby server and bring it up to
dump from, will all of the database file have something written to
them at some point during the dump? Transactional information is
what I'd assume would be written, if so, but I'm not really sure of
the low level details there.

Erik Jones

DBA | Emma®
erik(at)myemma(dot)com
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