Re: pg_dump --split patch

Hi,

Marko Tiikkaja <pgmail@joh.to> writes:
> The general output scheme looks like this:
>    schemaname/OBJECT_TYPES/object_name.sql,

I like this feature, I actually did have to code it myself in the past
and several other people did so, so we already have at least 3 copies of
`getddl` variants around. I really think this feature should be shipped
by default with PostgreSQL.

I don't much care for the all uppercase formating of object type
directories in your patch though.

> Overloaded functions are dumped into the same file.  Object names are
> encoded into the POSIX Portable Filename Character Set ([a-z0-9._-]) by
> replacing any characters outside that set with an underscore.

What happens if you have a table foo and another table "FoO"?

> Restoring the dump is supported through an index.sql file containing
> statements which include (through \i) the actual object files in the dump
> directory.

I think we should be using \ir now that we have that.

> Any thoughts?  Objections on the idea or the implementation?

As far as the implementation goes, someone with more experience on the
Archiver Handles should have a look. To me, it looks like you are trying
to shoehorn your feature in the current API and that doesn't feel good.

The holly grail here that we've been speaking about in the past would be
to separate out tooling and formats so that we have:

   pg_dump | pg_restore
   pg_export | psql

In that case we would almost certainly need libpgdump to share the code,
and we maybe could implement a binary output option for pg_dump too
(yeah, last time it was proposed we ended up with bytea_output = 'hex').

That libpgdump idea basically means we won't have the --split feature in
9.3, and that's really bad, as we already are some releases late on
delivering that, in my opinion.

Maybe the pg_export and pg_dump tool could share code by just #include
magic rather than a full blown lib in a first incantation?

Regards,
-- 
Dimitri Fontaine
http://2ndQuadrant.fr     PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support