Re: Non-text mode for pg_dumpall

On 2024-06-10 Mo 10:14, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 08:58:49AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>> Tom and Nathan opined recently that providing for non-text mode for
>> pg_dumpall would be a Good Thing (TM). Not having it has been a
>> long-standing complaint, so I've decided to give it a go.
> Thank you!
>
>> I think we would need to restrict it to directory mode, at least to begin
>> with. I would have a toc.dat with a different magic block (say "PGGLO"
>> instead of "PGDMP") containing the global entries (roles, tablespaces,
>> databases). Then for each database there would be a subdirectory (named for
>> its toc entry) with a standard directory mode dump for that database. These
>> could be generated in parallel (possibly by pg_dumpall calling pg_dump for
>> each database). pg_restore on detecting a global type toc.data would restore
>> the globals and then each of the databases (again possibly in parallel).
> I'm curious why we couldn't also support the "custom" format.

We could, but the housekeeping would be a bit harder. We'd need to keep
pointers to the offsets of the per-database TOCs (I don't want to have a
single per-cluster TOC). And we can't produce it in parallel, so I'd
rather start with something we can produce in parallel.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com