Tom Lane wrote:

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:

Well, the other issue is how many canned breakup schemes we are going to 
support. If this particular one is of sufficiently general usefulness 
then I have no objection. But when you can produce it trivially from the 
output of "pg_dump -s", the need to hardcode it hardly seems pressing.


FWIW, I am in favor of providing a way to break up the dump output like
this, I was merely objecting to the vocabulary ;-).  We have certainly
seen tons of people burnt by the performance problems inherent in
separate-data-and-schema restores, and splitting the dump into three
parts instead of two seems like it would fix that.

But I also like Alvaro's comment that this should be on the restore side
not so much the dump side.  If you do two or three successive pg_dump
runs to make your dump then you run a nontrivial risk of not getting
consistent dumps.  My advice to people would be to do *one* full
"pg_dump -Fc" and then extract three scripts out of that.

The question then is whether it's worth providing the extraction
functionality in a more canned, user-friendly form than "here, hack up
the -L output with this perl script".  I'd vote yes.

			regards, tom lane

I greatly appreciate the comments here and am glad that my initial idea has support. This thread highlights to me the difference between the "hey there's a good idea there despite the fact that's he's obviously not a veteran software developer" culture that the PostgreSQL community has instead of the "he is obviously not a veteran software developer so what on Earth could he have to offer us" responses I've had from various other open source projects.

On a less obsequious note, I agree that pg_dump should be used to dump everything in a single run to avoid consistency issues, and the selection of data to be restored should be done with pg_restore. As this is a feature that I would benefit greatly from, how do I go about ensuring that this idea finds its way to the appropriate developer and doesn't get forgotten in the mountain of ideas in the "that'd be nice to have some day" category?

- Naz