Hi all,
I brought this up a few years ago in the 7.4 days, and since there is still no satisfactory solution to this I thought I'd raise it again. When dumping a schema, it is often necessary to dump the tables separately to the constraints and other non-structural metadata. The most obvious use case for this is when updating a schema for a database.

Assume I have a database named "production" and one named "testing". Lets now say that I have decided that "testing" is correct and the app is ready to work with it, and I now want to put the data from "production" into the schema from "testing".

Currently, I have to dump the schema from the "testing" database, and then manually break it after the table definitions, and before any constraints. Otherwise, the data won't restore properly due to ordering issues etc. It would be far easier if there were a mechanism in pg_dump that allowed you do dump the two parts of the schema separately, allowing easy scripting of this, and not requiring you to by hand examine the file and use head/tail to apply only the correct parts of the schema at the appropriate points in the script.

I've been given a few different suggestions over the years, but they all involve computational detection of the break point in the schema dump, which is unreliable and hacky. A proper mechanism in pg_dump would be next to trivial to implement (for someone familiar with the code and who could code C, which I can't otherwise I'd do it), avoid potentially silent bugs in shell scripts and would massively assist in the efficient manipulation of in-place PostgreSQL databases.

I hope someone agrees with me :)

السلام عليكم
- Naz.

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