Re: In-order pg_dump (or in-order COPY TO)

On Wednesday 2025-08-27 00:54, Adrian Klaver wrote:

>Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:54:52
>From: Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com>
>To: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net>, pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org
>Subject: Re: In-order pg_dump (or in-order COPY TO)
>
> On 8/26/25 12:43, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
>>  Hello list,
>>
>>  I am storing dumps of a database (pg_dump custom format) in a de-
>>  duplicating backup server. Each dump is many terabytes in size, so
>>  deduplication is very important. And de-duplication itself is based on
>>  rolling checksums which is pretty flexible, it can compensate for blocks
>>  moving by some offset.
>>
>>  Unfortunately after I did pg_restore to a new server, I notice that the
>>  dumps from the new server are not being de-duplicated, all blocks are
>>  considered new.
>

> What are the pg_dump/pg_restore commands?
>
> What are the Postgres versions involved?
>
> Are they community versions of Postgres or something else?
>
> What is the depduplication program?
>
>


Dump is from PostgreSQL 16, it's pg_dump writing to stdout:

pg_dump -v --format=custom --compress=none --no-toast-compression --serializable-deferrable db_name  |  borg create ...


As you can see the backup (and deduplicating) program is borgbackup.


Restore is in PostgreSQL 17:

I first create the empty tables by running the DDL commands in version 
control to setup the database. And then I do pg_restore --data-only:

pg_restore -vvvv -j 8 -U db_owner -d db_name --schema=public --section=data  dump_file


Worth noting is that the above pg_restore goes through the WAL, i.e. all 
writes are done by walwriter, not the backend directly.

Postgres is standard open source running on own server. It has a couple 
of custom patches that shouldn't matter in this codepath.


>>  Thanks in advance,
>>  Dimitris