Re: Bug #631: pg_dumpall does not accept -F or -f

"Donald A Pellegrino" <Donald(dot)A(dot)Pellegrino(at)USA(dot)dupont(dot)com> writes:
> This presumes however that the custom file formats output by each pg_dump
> for a database can be concatenated into a single file. Is this possible?

AFAIK none of the custom formats are amenable to that. We could imagine
giving pg_dumpall a target directory, into which it writes a dump file
for each database --- but there are a lot of unpleasant implications of
that approach, disk space usage not the least of 'em.

One interesting thought would be for pg_dumpall to wrap some kind of
wrapper format ("tar" comes to mind immediately, but I'm not sure if
it will work when the file sizes aren't known in advance) around the
per-database files produced by pg_dump. I am not sure that this can be
done comfortably in a shell script; it might be necessary to rewrite
pg_dumpall in C. And we'd probably need a pg_restoreall program to
disassemble the wrapper and invoke pg_restore on each chunk.

regards, tom lane