On Mon, 2025-01-20 at 16:45 -0500, Corey Huinker wrote: > > What I struggle to understand is how that purpose isn't served better > by statistics being in SECTION_NONE like COMMENTs are, so that they > are imported immediately after the object that they reference.
Tom, you expressed the strongest opinions on this point, can you expand a bit? If I understand correctly: * We strongly want stats to be exported by default[1]. * Adding a SECTION_STATS could work, but would be non-trivial and might break expectations about the set of sections available[2]. * SECTION_NONE doesn't seem right. There would be no way to get the stats using --section. Also, if there is no section boundary for the stats, then couldn't they appear in a surprising order? * I'm not sure about placing stats in SECTION_POST_DATA. That doesn't seem terrible to me, but not great either. * I'm also not 100% sure about the flags. The default should dump the stats, of course. And I like the idea of allowing any combination of schema, data and stats to be exported. But that leaves a wrinkle for -- data-only, which (as of v38) does not dump stats, because stats are a third kind of thing. Perhaps stats should be expressed as a subtype of data somehow, but I'm not sure exactly how. Regards, Jeff Davis [1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3228677.1713844341%40sss.pgh.pa.us [2] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3156140.1713817153%40sss.pgh.pa.us