Hi, On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 8:03 PM, Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > Greetings, > > * David Hedberg (david.hedb...@gmail.com) wrote: >> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:01 PM, Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: >> > * David Hedberg (david.hedb...@gmail.com) wrote: >> >> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 5:03 PM, Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: >> >> Generally, my thinking is that this can be pretty useful in general >> >> besides encryption. For other formats the dumps can already be written >> >> to standard output and piped through for example gpg or a custom >> >> compression application of the administrators choice, so in a sense >> >> this functionality would merely add the same feature to the directory >> >> format. >> > >> > That's certainly not the same though. One of the great advantages of >> > custom and directory format dumps is the TOC and the ability to >> > selectively extract data from them without having to read the entire >> > dump file. You end up losing that if you have to pass the entire dump >> > through something else because you're using the pipe. >> >> I can maybe see the problem here, but I apologize if I'm missing the point. >> >> Since all the files are individually passed through separate instances >> of the pipe, they can also be individually restored. I guess the >> --list option could be (adopted to be) used to produce a clear text >> TOC to further use in selective decryption of the rest of the archive? >
I admit that my understanding of the custom format was naive (I have never actually used it). >> If this is simply outside the scope of the directory or the custom >> format, that is certainly understandable (and, to me, somewhat >> regrettable :-) ). > > What I think isn't getting through is that while this is an interesting > approach, it really isn't a terribly good one, regardless of how > flexible you view it to be. The way to move this forward seems pretty > clearly to work on adding generalized encryption support to > pg_dump/restore that doesn't depend on calling external programs > underneath of the directory format with a pipe. I did get the message that it wasn't the optimal way of doing it, and I have now also gotten the message that it's probably not really wanted at all. Thanks you for your insights, David
