Re: pg_basebackup for streaming base backups

Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 18:18, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> No.  Don't even think of going there --- we got rid of user-accessible
>> names in the filesystem years ago and we're not going back.  Consider
>>        CREATE TABLESPACE "/foo/bar" LOCATION '/foo/bar';
>
> Well, we'd try to name the file for that "<oid>-/foo/bar.tar", which I
> guess would break badly, yes.
>
> I guess we could normalize the tablespace name into [a-zA-Z0-9] or so,
> which would still be useful for the majority of cases, I think?

Well if we're not using user names, there's no good choice except for
system name, and the one you're making up here isn't the "true" one…

Now I think the unfriendliness is around the fact that you need to
prepare (untar, unzip) and start a cluster from the backup to be able to
know what file contains what.  Is it possible to offer a tool that lists
the logical objects contained into each tar file?

Maybe adding a special section at the beginning of each.  That would be
logically like pg_dump "catalog", but implemented as a simple "noise"
file that you simply `cat` with some command.

Once more, I'm still unclear how important that is, but it's scratching.

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