Khusro Jaleel <mailing-li...@kerneljack.com> wrote: > On 02/15/2012 12:58 PM, Vladimir Rusinov wrote: >> >> pg_dump won't block writes, thanks to MVCC. It may increase bloat >> and it will block DDL operations (ALTER TABLE/etc), but if your >> database is relatively small but have high load and you need >> frequent backups, this may be a way to go. > Thanks Vladimir. Would a simple script with 'pg_start_backup' and > 'pg_stop_backup' and an rsync job or tar job in between would > work equally well? I thought that was the better way to do it, > rather than pg_dump? The PITR style backup you describe doesn't cause bloat or block DDL, and if you archive the WAL files you can restore to any point in time following the pg_stop_backup. pg_dump just gives you a snapshot as of the start of the dump, so if you use that you would need to start a complete dump every 30 minutes. With PITR backups and WAL archiving you could set your archvie_timeout to force timely archiving (or use streaming replication if you are on 9.0 or later) and effectively dump incremental database *activity* to stay up-to-date. Now, if 30 minutes of activity is more than the size of the database, pg_dump could, as Vladimir says, still be a good alternative. -Kevin
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