Jon Erdman <postgresql(at)thewickedtribe(dot)net> writes:
> That would seem to indicate that in the case of partial archives these
> missing deps wouldn't cause any worse failure than they otherwise would,
> since they'd be just as missing if you did a normal restore vs. a
> parallel one.
The dependency info isn't used at all unless you do a parallel restore.
We put that information into the dump file format specification years
ago with the idea that it would someday be used for purposes like this,
but 8.4's -j is the first attempt to actually use it. (The lack of
actual use is not unrelated to the fact that pre-8.0's representation
was unusable ...)
regards, tom lane