Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: > On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 9:02 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >> You could argue that it would be better for pg_dump to emit something >> like >> >> CREATE TABLE c (...); >> ALTER TABLE c INHERIT p; >> >> so that if p isn't around, at least c gets created. And I think it >> *would* be better, probably. But if that isn't a new feature then >> I don't know what is. And partitioning really ought to track the >> behavior of inheritance here.
> Hmm, I think that'd actually be worse, because it would break the use > case where you want to restore the old contents of one particular > inheritance child. So you drop that child (but not the parent or any > other children) and then do a selective restore of that one child. > Right now that works fine, but it'll fail with an error if we try to > create the already-extant parent. Uh ... what in that is creating the already-extant parent? What I'm envisioning is simply that the TOC entry for the child table contains those two statements rather than "CREATE TABLE c (...) INHERITS (p)". The equivalent thing for the partitioned case is to use a separate ATTACH PARTITION command rather than naming the parent immediately in the child's CREATE TABLE. This is independent of the question of how --table and friends ought to behave. > I think one answer to the original complaint might be to add a new > flag to pg_dump, something like --recursive-selection, maybe -r for > short, which makes --table, --exclude-table, and --exclude-table-data > cascade to inheritance descendents. Yeah, you could do it like that. Another way to do it would be to create variants of all the selection switches, along the lines of "--table-all=foo" meaning "foo plus its children". Then you could have some switches recursing and others not within the same command. But maybe that's more flexibility than needed ... and I'm having a hard time coming up with nice switch names, anyway. Anyway, I'm still of the opinion that it's fine to leave this as a future feature. If we've gotten away without it this long for inherited tables, it's unlikely to be critical for partitioned tables. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers