Re: pg_dump additional options for performance

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Tom Lane wrote:
> * --schema-before-data, --data-only, and --schema-after-data can be

I thought you were arguing for some better names at one point? Those seem
very confusing to me, especially "--schema-after-data". I know it means
"the parts of the schema that come after the data" but it could
also be read as other ways, including "put the schema after the data" - which
makes no sense, but the name is not exactly intuitive either. "Pre" and "Post"
at least are slightly better, IMO. How about --pre-data-schema
and --post-data-schema? Or --pre-data-section and --post-data-section?
Or (my favorites) --pre-data-commands and --post-data-commands? As the
existing docs say, "commands" are what we are generating.

> them as data, because the objects they are attached to are data. I kind
> of like the latter approach because it would create an invariant that
> comments appear in the same dump section as the object commented on.
> Thoughts?)

+1 on putting them next to the object commented on.

> And there's yet another issue here, which is that it's not entirely clear
> that the type of an object uniquely determines whether it's before or
> after data.

Wouldn't that be a problem with current dumps as well then?

> We could solve that problem by inserting a "dummy data" TOC entry where
> the data would have appeared, but this will only work in new archive
> files. With an implementation like this, pg_restore with
> --schema-before-data or --schema-after-data won't behave very nicely on a
> pre-8.4 --schema-only archive file. (Presumably it would act as though
> all the objects were "before" data.) Is that a small enough corner case
> to live with in order to gain implementation simplicity and robustness?

I'm not comfortable with corner cases for pg_restore backwards compatibility.
What exactly would happen (worse case) in that scenario?

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
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http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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