Re: FK disappeared in 8.3.3

Achilleas Mantzios <achill(at)matrix(dot)gatewaynet(dot)com> writes:
> At this time our problematic vessel was running 7.4.2. This vessel upgraded to 8.3.3
> some time in January 2009.

7.4!?

I can't shake the suspicion that some of your issues arose from trying
to load a later-version pg_dump output into an older-version server.
The discrepancies you're seeing are closely related to places where
we've changed pg_dump's output over the years, and not always in
backwards-compatible ways. The older server would throw syntax errors
on the newer commands, and if you didn't notice or follow up on that
during the reload, the outcome would be that the objects those commands
tried to create would just not be there. Which is what you've got.
I don't have enough information to show the exact chain of events, but I
think that something like this is a lot more probable than a random
hardware failure that just happened to produce these particular results.

regards, tom lane