Re: Suggestions needed about how to dump/restore a database

Hi all,

> I've got a DB in production that is bigger than 2GB that dumping it
> takes more than 12 hours. I have a new server to replace this old one
> where I have restore the DB's dump. The problem is I can't afford to
> have the server out of business for so long, so I need your advice about
> how you'd do this dump/restore. The big amount of data is placed in two
> tables (statistics data), so I was thinking in dump/restore all except
> this two tables and once the server is running again I'd dump/restore
> this data. The problem is I don't know how exactly do this.
>
> Any suggestion?
>
> Thanks

Jeff answer made me check what were the configuration parameters.
That machine had the default ones, so I tweaked a bit them and now I got
a dump in about 2 hours. To dump the DB I'm using the following command:

/usr/bin/pg_dump -o -b -Fc $db > $backup_file

And as result I got a file of 2.2GB. The improvement has been quite
big but still very far from the 10-15 minutes that Jeff says or the
Thomas'3 minutes.

The version I'm running is a 7.4.2 and the postgresql.conf parameters
are the following:

# - Memory -

shared_buffers = 10000 # min 16, at least max_connections*2,
8KB each
sort_mem = 10240 # min 64, size in KB
vacuum_mem = 81920 # min 1024, size in KB

# - Free Space Map -

max_fsm_pages = 40000 # min max_fsm_relations*16, 6 bytes each
max_fsm_relations = 2000 # min 100, ~50 bytes each

Any suggestions the even reduce more the dump period?

Thank you very much.
--
Arnau