OK, that was what I thought at first, but then I read this note in `man pg_dump`:
When -t is specified, pg_dump makes no attempt to dump any other database objects that the selected table(s) might depend upon. so I supposed that that dependency information was *not* required. So I posted the bug. Is that note then outdated/incorrect? Or am I mistaken in finding it at odds with your explanation? Regards, Gulli On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Gunnlaugur Thor Briem <gunnlau...@gmail.com> writes: > > pg_dump takes O(N) time dumping just one table (or a few) explicitly > > specified with a -t parameter. It thus becomes painfully slow on a > database > > with very many tables. > > This is not a bug. It needs information about all the tables anyway > to deal with dependencies (possible inheritance and similar situations). > > Having said that, it does look like getTables is pulling back a lot of > info that we don't need *yet*, and would never need if we conclude we > don't need to dump the table. Possibly some of this work could usefully > be postponed to, say, getTableAttrs. OTOH, if that makes the normal > dump-everything case noticeably slower, it's unlikely such a patch would > get accepted. > > regards, tom lane >