On 2025-12-31 We 12:04 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Andrew Dunstan<[email protected]> writes:
On 2025-12-30 Tu 5:50 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
As I was working through it, I realized that there's one
potentially-nasty point that might cause upgrading problems.
To wit, pg_dump and pg_dumpall have historically replicated the
source server's standard_conforming_strings setting into their
output: they emit a SET command for that, and any string literals
appearing in views or the like will be escaped accordingly.
So if your old installation had standard_conforming_strings = off,
and all you have from it is existing pg_dump output (either text
or archive format), you are in a sticky situation because that
dump will not restore cleanly.
Have we ever promised that dumps made using pg_dump/pg_dumpall from
other than the target version work?
We may not promise it, but I think we've always tried very hard to
not break old pg_dump files, precisely because they might be the only
available backup.
I don't see this as a big issue, unless I'm misunderstanding.
Personally I would call it a deal-breaker if I thought it'd affect
more than a very very tiny number of people. But the entire premise
of this patch is that nobody is using standard_conforming_strings =
off in production anymore. If that isn't true it's probably a
mistake to go forward anyway.
I think you're probably right that very few people are using it. Not
sure how we'd find out if they are, though.
cheers
andrew
--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com
