Re: Adding WHERE clause to pg_dump

On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 19:33 +0100, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 13:31 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > > Attached patch implements WHERE clauses for pg_dump.
> >
> > I still have serious reservations about adding such an ugly,
> > non-orthogonal wart to pg_dump. Why is it not appropriate to just
> > do a COPY (SELECT ...) TO STDOUT when you need this?
>
> So you can dump a coherent sample database in one command, not 207.
>
> Every user of PostgreSQL wants a dev/test database. If the database is
> large it isn't practical to take a complete copy. Nor is it practical to
> hand-write a data sampling extraction program and if you do, its usually
> imperfect in many ways.
>
> Adding this feature gives a very fast capability to create sample
> databases, or incremental backups for many cases.

Not sure I buy this argument. I am all for usability and I would be the
first to shout about the general ridiculousness of pg_dump/all/restore
but in this case I think Tom is right. This feature could easily be done
in a script without harassing pg_dump.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

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