Thread

Re: Can we remove support for standard_conforming_strings = off yet?

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> — 2025-12-31T16:02:36Z

On 2025-12-30 Tu 5:50 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
>> standard_conforming_strings has defaulted to ON since 2010 (see
>> 0839f312e in the 9.1 release).  I propose that it's finally time to
>> force it on and get rid of code that supports the "off" setting.
> Here's a draft patch series for that.
>
> As I was working through it, I realized that there's one
> potentially-nasty point that might cause upgrading problems.
> To wit, pg_dump and pg_dumpall have historically replicated the
> source server's standard_conforming_strings setting into their
> output: they emit a SET command for that, and any string literals
> appearing in views or the like will be escaped accordingly.
> So if your old installation had standard_conforming_strings = off,
> and all you have from it is existing pg_dump output (either text
> or archive format), you are in a sticky situation because that
> dump will not restore cleanly.  This isn't impossible to get
> out of, but you'd probably have to stand up a pre-v19 server,
> restore the dump into that, and take a fresh dump made with
> standard_conforming_strings = on.  The alternative would be
> manual correction of literals in the dump script, which seems
> far too error-prone to be recommendable.


Have we ever promised that dumps made using pg_dump/pg_dumpall from 
other than the target version work?

I don't see this as a big issue, unless I'm misunderstanding.


cheers


andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com