Hi, On 2018-07-27 12:51:17 -0400, Robert Haas wrote: > 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.
My point is more that it forces users to make choices whenever they use pg_dump. And the tar format has plenty downsides that aren't immediately apparent. By keeping something with only a small upside around, we force users to waste time. > Why did we invent "custom" format dumps instead of using a standard > container-file format like tar/cpio/zip/whatever? Because they're either not all that simple, or don't random read access inside. But that's just a guess, not fact. Greetings, Andres Freund
