Proposed patch: make pg_dump --data-only consider FK constraints
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org
Date: 2008-09-07T18:06:40Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
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Okay, I got tired of seeing people complain about foreign-key constraint violations in data-only dumps. While it's true that the problem can't be solved in the general case (because of potentially circular references), we could certainly make pg_dump at least *try* to order the tables according to foreign key relationships. It turns out not to even require a whole lot of new code. Accordingly I propose the attached patch. It will order the tables safely if it can, and otherwise complain like this: pg_dump: WARNING: circular foreign-key constraints among these table(s): pg_dump: master pg_dump: child pg_dump: You may not be able to restore the dump without using --disable-triggers or temporarily dropping the constraints. Comments? regards, tom lane