Re: pg_dump issues

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 4:07 PM, DM <dm(dot)aeqa(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> I have a database with only one schema with 5 tables
> nspname |       relname           |  size
>      ---------+---------------------+---------
>      sch     | job1                      | 211 MB
>      sch     | job2                      | 5611 MB
>      sch     | job3                      | 6584 kB
>      sch     | job4                      | 89 MB
>      sch     | job5                      | 39 MB
> Total sum of sizes of the table is less than 6 GB.
> When I do a pg_dump of this database it is 20GB (I also did a pg_dump of
> only schema data and the size was still the same). I am using postgres 8.4.1
> version.
> Could any one explain why the pg_dump size of the file is 3 times the size
> of the tables?

Your database is likely full of easily compressed text, which
postgresql automagically compresses inline when storing it and
decompresses when it retrieves it. To see if this is the case, try
zipping or gzipping or bzip2ing the dump file and see if it comes out
to something less than or about 6Gigs.