Re: New pg_dump options: exclude tables/schemas, multiple all, wildcards

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> I wonder if there's a way to have the server process the matching? That
> way we could have LIKE expressions in the switches, which would be
> simpler in the code and more powerful. I don't know how pg_dump works
> so I can't really answer the question. We desperately need this
> capability however, as patches have been floating since before 8.0 and
> we still don't have it.

It won't fit into the existing code easily, but it could probably be done.
I toyed around with making the regex more robust, but three things
stopped me:

1) The "star at start" and "star at end" catches probably 99% of the cases,
and is way better than what we have now, so better a bird in the hand...

2) It would be a lot more work to send it to the backend or import some
of the regex code.

and most importantly:

3) It would require yet more arguments to pg_dump. The moment we start allowing
regular expression characters that are also valid identifier names (e.g. "."
and "_") we'll need some way to tell pg_dump whether we mean a literal search
or a regular expression one. Which probably means more arguments or at least
modifying the existing one in a possibly nonintuitive, and definitely more
complex, manner. I'm open to suggestions, however, but I don't want to make
things too byzantine for the users.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)endpoint(dot)com greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200601171718
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8

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