Re: [HACKERS] pg_dump not dumping all tables

"G. Anthony Reina" <reina(at)nsi(dot)edu> writes:
> I just installed 6.5.1 on my RH 6.0 PII/400 MHz machine. I had
> previously been running the database on 6.4.2 and had several backups
> made through pgdump. When I tried to restore the database (i.e. psql -e
> db01 < db.backup) all of the tables were created, but only some of them
> had data. These tables are just real tables, not views or anything
> strange. Luckily, I also had a back up where I had pg_dump'ed each table
> separately (so I'm not in a total jam). But I can't figure out why the
> pg_dump didn't backup all of the data.

That is distressing, all right ... and it's not a report we've heard
before. Can you see any pattern to which tables' contents were saved
and which were not? I'd wonder about peculiar table names, seldom-
used column data types, and so forth.

Did your indexes get recreated from the db.backup file?

Is there any chance that the db.backup file got truncated (say, because
you ran out of disk space during the dump)?

If you can, it would be nice to see the db.backup file itself, minus
data so that it's not too big to email. If you could strip the data
out and just indicate which tables had data and which not, it should
amount to only a few K of table-creation commands...

regards, tom lane