Re: WAL and pg_dump

* Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> > As I recall, the initial backup of our 360GB (or so) database took
> > about 6 hours and the restore only took about 2 hours.
>
> Really? I'd certainly have guessed the opposite (mainly because of
> index build time, constraint checking, etc during reload). Could it
> be that compression of the pg_dump output is swamping all else during
> the backup phase?

Sorry, I thought I was being clear (guess not)- I wasn't talking about
using pg_dump but rather PITR and tar/untar. I was trying to point out
that using PITR and tar/untar can be much, much, much nicer when you
have lots and lots of data to deal with (like a data warehouse would
have...). Of course, I can also do snapshots with the SAN, but that's a
one-time thing unlike PITR where you can choose any point in time to
recover to.

Thanks,

Stephen