Re: pg_dump insert transactions

Kris Jurka <books(at)ejurka(dot)com> writes:
> This patch makes pg_dump wrap insert dumps (-d, -D) in a transaction to
> speed the restore process.

What's the point of this, compared to Simon's recent patch adding an
option to wrap the whole output in one big transaction? An intermediate
level doesn't seem very interesting ... and lord knows pg_dump has an
unreasonable number of options already.

> It also adds an option to disable these
> transactions for doing things like copying only newly inserted values from
> one database to another (assuming old ones will fail on an unique
> constraint).

I would think that would be the main use-case for still using -d/-D at
all (instead of COPY), so this seems of dubious usefulness, and
certainly not what should be the default.

regards, tom lane