Re: Recovering data via raw table and field separators

On 12/4/07, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 03:05:53PM -0500, John Wells wrote:
> > So, given a database table file that still has records in it, and
> > given the fact that these records could be parsed and displayed if the
> > proper utilty knew how to read the various data structures used to
> > denote field and record length, is there no utility to do this? I
> > seems that it would be fairly straight forward to somehow read the
> > records, yet to pay no mind to the deleted flag (or whatever mechanism
> > postgresql uses to mark them as deleted).
>
> Ofcourse, see the pg_filedump mentioned at the beginning of this
> thread.

Thanks Martijn,

I have pg_filedump installed, but can't figure out how to dump the
rows themselves. I get the equivalent of the output at the end of this
post. Looking over the --help, there's nothing obvious that has gotten
me further.

Is there a trick I'm missing?

Thanks!
John

*******************************************************************
* PostgreSQL File/Block Formatted Dump Utility - Version 8.1.1
*
* File: 17741
* Options used: -i -f
*
* Dump created on: Wed Dec 5 11:21:07 2007
*******************************************************************

Block 0 ********************************************************
<Header> -----
Block Offset: 0x00000000 Offsets: Lower 196 (0x00c4)
Block: Size 8192 Version 3 Upper 8192 (0x2000)
LSN: logid 0 recoff 0x0181e758 Special 8192 (0x2000)
Items: 44 Free Space: 7996
Length (including item array): 200

0000: 00000000 58e78101 01000000 c4000020 ....X..........
0010: 00200320 441f0000 781e0000 b81d0000 . . D...x.......
0020: f41c0000 301c0000 641b0000 981a0000 ....0...d.......
0030: c4190000 f4180000 24180000 54170000 ........$...T...
0040: 80160000 ac150000 e0140000 10140000 ................
0050: 40130000 74120000 a0110000 d0100000 @...t...........
0060: 04100000 380f0000 680e0000 980d0000 ....8...h.......
0070: c40c0000 f80b0000 280b0000 540a0000 ........(...T...
0080: 88090000 b4080000 00080000 48070000 ............H...
0090: 90060000 d8050000 20050000 68040000 ........ ...h...
00a0: b4030000 fc020000 48020000 90010000 ........H.......
00b0: d4000000 48030000 94020000 e0010000 ....H...........
00c0: 30010000 00000000 0.......