Re: how robust are custom dumps?

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 09:42, Willy-Bas Loos <willybas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> What was the experience?  Is it possible you had specified a
>> compression level without the format set to custom?  That would result
>> in a plain text output within a gzip file, which would then error out
>> if you tried to restore it with pg_restore, but would be perfectly
>> valid if you passed the uncompressed output directly into psql.
>
>
> yes, probably. I remember that it was a binary file, but i didn't know about
> the possibility of gzip in pg_dump.
> Possibly the 2 GB size limit for a FAT partition was exceeded, but that
> would have resulted in an error, so i would have known.

We used to have a bug/lackoffeature in pg_dump at the 2GB boundary as
well, IIRC, specifically on Win32. Maybe you were hit by that one..

> i think it's time to restore my trust in the custom dumps. :)

Yes.

> i do have one suggestion.
> pg_restore only gives a user this feedback, when he makes this
> mistake:"pg_restore: [archiver] input file does not appear to be a valid
> archive".
>
> Would it be feasible for pg_restore to detect that it is a different pg_dump
> format and inform the user about it?

The main one you'd want to detect is plain I think - and I don't know
if we can reliably detect that. It could be just a generic textfile,
after all - how would we know the difference?

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 Magnus Hagander
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