Re: proposal: possibility to read dumped table's name from file

Greetings,

* Pavel Stehule (pavel.stehule@gmail.com) wrote:
> > I agree that being able to configure pg_dump via a config file would
> > be very useful, but the syntax proposed here feels much more like a
> > hacked-up syntax designed to meet this one use case, rather than a
> > good general-purpose design that can be easily extended.
> 
> Nobody sent a real use case for introducing the config file. There was a
> discussion about formats, and you introduce other dimensions and
> variability.

I'm a bit baffled by this because it seems abundently clear to me that
being able to have a config file for pg_dump would be extremely helpful.
There's no shortage of times that I've had to hack up a shell script and
figure out quoting and set up the right set of options for pg_dump,
resulting in things like:

pg_dump \
  --host=myserver.com \
  --username=postgres \
  --schema=public \
  --schema=myschema \
  --no-comments \
  --no-tablespaces \
  --file=somedir \
  --format=d \
  --jobs=5

which really is pretty grotty.  Being able to have a config file that
has proper comments would be much better and we could start to extend to
things like "please export schema A to directory A, schema B to
directory B" and other ways of selecting source and destination, and
imagine if we could validate it too, eg:

pg_dump --config=whatever --dry-run

or --check-config maybe.

This isn't a new concept either- export and import tools for other
databases have similar support, eg: Oracle's imp/exp tool, mysqldump
(see: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/option-files.html which
has a TOML-looking format too), pgloader of course has a config file,
etc.  We certainly aren't in novel territory here.

Thanks,

Stephen