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pg_dumpbinary v2.9 released

Posted on 2023-02-07 by Gilles Darold
Related Open Source

Zurich, Switzerland - February 4th, 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 2.9 was released today, this is a maintenance release of version 2.8 published some days before. This releases add some new features to pg_restorebinary and fix some issues reported by users.

  • Force pg_restorebinary to stop on pg_restore or psql system command error, print the failing command and exit with code 1.
  • Add option -f, --outfile to generate a restore file usable with psql. The purpose of this option is to be able to debug pg_dumprestore by looking at the generated DDL and \copy commands.

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 :