On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:46 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.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
