September 26, 2024: PostgreSQL 17 Released!

pg_dumpbinary v2.10 released

Posted on 2023-03-30 by Gilles Darold
Related Open Source

Zurich, Switzerland - March 30th, 2023

pg_dumpbinary

pg_dumpbinary is a program used to dump a PostgreSQL database with data dumped in binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary that is provided with this tool.

pg_dumpbinary v2.10 was released today, it adds a new option to the pg_dumpbinary command:

  • -C, --compress-level 0-9 : speed of the gzip compression using the specified digit, between 1 and 9, default to 6. Setting it to 0 disable the compression.

This option can be helpful to speed the export when the majority of the data don't compress well.

It also fixes several issues reported since last release.

A full list of changes and acknowledgements can be found here

pg_dumpbinary is useful in some situations:

  • you have bytea that can not be exported by pg_dump because the total size of the escape/hex output exceed 1Gb.
  • you have custom type that stores \0 internally in bytea but data are returned as char/varchar/text which truncate data after the '\0'. In this case pg_dump will export data in the output type which will result in data lost.
  • any other case where binary format can be useful.

If you are in this case pg_dumpbinary will help you by dumping the PostgreSQL database in binary format. In all other cases you must use the pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL.

See documentation for a complete description of the features.

Links & Credits

pg_dumpbinary is an open project from LzLabs GmbH. Any contribution to build a better tool is welcome. You just have to send your ideas, features requests or patches using the GitHub tools.

Links :