Re: [GSOC] questions about idea "rewrite pg_dump as library"

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 1:00 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:

> > Well, either they want that or they want that output more
> > accessibly, and without all the baggage that pg_dump necessarily
> > brings to the table. pg_dump does a lot of stuff that's basically
> > designed for bulk operations, and often what people want is a way to
> > get, say, the creation DDL for some object, without any locks than
> > the usual locks any transaction takes.
>
> Yes- being able to get that from a simple database function would be
> very nice. I wonder if some of what's been done with the "event"
> triggers would inform us about what that API should look like.
>
I recall discussions about reverse engineering of a parsed query tree in
the event trigger threads but nothing has been committed I think. Also, you
need to consider that implementing such reverse engineering mechanism in
core might not be a good thing for new features and maintenance, as it
would mean that it is necessary to change those APIs consistently with what
is added on the parsing side.
It could make more sense to have such a set of functions created as a
separate project.

My 2c.
--
Michael