Re: Deprecating, and scheduling removal of, pg_dump's tar format.

Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> But he isn't proposing getting rid of -Fp, just -Ft. Isn't -Ft is just as
> PostgresSQL-specific
> as -Fd is?

No. The point about -Ft format is that you can extract files that contain
SQL text and COPY data, using nothing but standard Unix tools (i.e. tar).
So just as with a plain-text dump, you'd have some work to do to get your
data into some other RDBMS, but it'd be mostly about SQL-compatibility
problems, not "what the heck is this binary file format".

I was thinking before that -Fd had basically the same payload files as
an -Ft archive, but it doesn't: we don't emit anything corresponding to
the "restore.sql" member of an -Ft archive. This means that -Fd still
leaves you needing PG-specific tools to interpret the toc.dat file,
so it's not a plausible answer if you would like to have something that's
more structured than a plain-text dump but will still be of use if your
PG tools are not available.

The -Ft format certainly has got its problems, and I wouldn't complain
if we decided to, say, extend -Fd format so that you could also get
info out of it without using pg_restore. But I do not think we should
just drop -Ft as long as it's our only nonproprietary structured
dump format.

regards, tom lane