Re: pgdump

Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> writes:
> Something like the design elaborated here:

> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2004-07/msg00374.php

> looks good to me, and would be preferrable to Andreas' patch IMHO.
> Unless I'm missing something, I don't see a patch from David Skoll in
> that thread that actually implements the above behavior. I'd be happy to
> implement Tom's suggested design for 8.1 unless someone has already
> beaten me to it.

A little further down-thread there was some discussion of also allowing
wild cards in the individual switches, eg

-t 's1.*'

(This would differ from '-n s1' in that a -t switch would restrict the
dump to tables only, whereas -n should take every sort of object in the
selected schema.) I dismissed it at the time because we were too close
to feature freeze, but the idea should be considered if you're going to
do a new patch for 8.1. I think the issues would be

* what are the wildcard rules exactly?
* what about quoting/downcasing rules?

Possibly it's sufficient to say "just like the way \d works in psql",
but we should look closely before leaping. We've been burnt before
by choosing rules that turned out to be awkward to use on a shell
command line because of interference from the shell's quoting and
expansion behavior.

regards, tom lane