Re: Does pg_dumpall do BLOBs too?

Frank Joerdens <frank(at)joerdens(dot)de> writes:
> The wrapper script doesn't seem to pass the option -Ft to pg_dump so it
> doesn't support output formats other than plain text which means you
> can't do BLOBs.

The trouble is that pg_dumpall wants to concatenate the output from
several pg_dumps, intermixed with commands issued by itself. Easy to do
with text outputs, not so easy with the non-text formats.

I could see making pg_dumpall emit a script that has the global setup
commands plus pg_restore calls referencing separately-created data
files, one per database. Trouble with that is that the data files
couldn't be sent to pg_dumpall's stdout, which means that pg_dumpall
would have to include options for deciding where to put them. And what
about the case where you have more than 4GB of data and a system that
doesn't do large files? Presently it's easy to pipe pg_dumpall to
"split", and cat the segments together to feed to psql when reloading.
But that method won't work under this scenario.

regards, tom lane