September 25, 2025: PostgreSQL 18 Released!

pg_dumpbinary v2.20 released

Posted on 2025-06-11 by Gilles Darold
Related Open Source

Antananarivo, Madagascar - June 04, 2025

pg_dumpbinary

pg_dumpbinary dumps a PostgreSQL database to a binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary, which is provided.

This is a maintenance release that fixes some issues reported by users since last release and adds an new command line option to the pg_restorebinary command.

  • Add -V, --verbose option to pg_restorebinary.
  • Change directory to writable one when sudo -u is used to avoid pg_restore to complain about "could not change directory" when the current directory is not writable by the running user. In this case pg_dumpbinary and pg_restorebinary will require an absolute path respectively for output and input directory.
  • Do not import the tmpdir() method when importing File::Spec.
  • Fix returned error code when no input directory or missing parameters.

pg_dumpbinary is useful when:

  • You have bytea that can not be exported by pg_dump because the total size of the escape/hex output exceeds 1Gb.
  • You have custom type that stores \0 internally in bytea but data are exported by pg_dump as char/varchar/text. In this case pg_dump truncates all data after the first \0, resulting in data loss.
  • Other cases where a binary output format is useful.

In these kinds of cases pg_dumpbinary helps by dumping the PostgreSQL database in a binary format. In all other cases the pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL are preferred.

See the documentation for a more complete description of available features.

Links & Credits

pg_dumpbinary is an Open Source project from LzLabs GmbH. Contributions and ideas are welcome. Send your ideas, features requests, or patches using GitHub's tools.

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