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

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
>> Is there any real reason to retain it?
>
> As I recall, the principal argument for having it to begin with was
> that it's a "non proprietary" format that could be read without any
> PG-specific tools. Perhaps the directory format could be said to
> serve that purpose too, but if you were to try to collapse a directory
> dump into one file for transportation, you'd have ... a tar dump.
>
> I think a more significant question is what we'd get by removing it?
> If you want to look around for features that are slightly less used
> than other arguably-equivalent things, we must have hundreds of those.
> Doesn't mean that those features have no user constituency.

Yeah. I don't mind removing really marginal features to ease
maintenance, but I'm not sure that this one is all that marginal or
that we'd save that much maintenance by eliminating it. I used
text-format dumps for years primarily because I figured that no matter
what happened, I'd always be able to find some way of getting my data
out of a text file. Ideally the PostgreSQL tools will always work,
but if they don't work and you have a text file, you have
alternatives. If they don't work and you have a format in some
PostgreSQL-specific format, then what?

I probably wouldn't be as nervous about this now as I was then, seeing
how careful we've been about this stuff. But I can certainly
understand somebody wanting a standard format rather than a
PostgreSQL-specific one. Why did we invent "custom" format dumps
instead of using a standard container-file format like
tar/cpio/zip/whatever?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company