Re: DB Dump Size

G'day,

I am just running a straight pg_dump with no options.
With the -Fc option the DB size is reduced to about: 700MB

Is the -Fc a compressed format? Are there any limitations or side effects
to using this output, is it slower?? etc etc. Can this output be restored
via the normal method of: psql dbname < sql.dump

Thanks.
Steve

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:30:07 +0200, Thomas Jacob <jacob(at)internet24(dot)de>
wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 12:06:53PM +1000, steve(at)outtalimits(dot)com(dot)au wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am curious as to why a pg dump of database "name" is 2.9gig. But is
>> measured at 1.66gig by:
>> SELECT pg_database_size(pg_database.datname) AS db_size FROM pg_database
>> WHERE pg_database.datname='name' ;
>>
>> This dump was about 1 gig around 12 months ago.
>
> Which options do you use for pg_dump? And what version of PosgreSQL are
> you running?
>
> In general it's not that strange for an uncompressed
> dump to be larger than the database size, plain SQL
> dumps are much less space efficient than a DBMS can
> be when it stores the data on disk. But of course, there
> also indices to consider.
>
> Have you tried pg_dump -Fc?
>
>> I am performing a monthly vacuum full on the database and a nightly
> vacuum
>> all
>
> That should only impact the pg_database_size.