Here's me speaking up -- I'd definitely use it! As a quick way to pull data into Excel to do basic reports or analysis, a CSV format would be great. Some of our users currently pull data into Excel for quickie analysis, but creating fixed-width data via psql requires them to parse the data and dumping anything via pg_dump with any delimiter (tabs, etc.) usually doesn't work due to the delimiters being embedded in the real data.
- Bill > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Andrew Dunstan > Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 2:16 PM > To: Tom Lane > Cc: PG Hackers > Subject: Re: [HACKERS] CSV mode option for pg_dump > > > Tom Lane wrote: > > Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > >> Something someone said on IRC just now triggered a little > memory ... > >> I > >> think we should provide an option to have pg_dump work in CSV mode > >> rather than text mode. This probably doesn't have much > importance in the > >> case of text dumps, but in custom or tar dumps where you > might want to > >> get at individual data members, having an option for CSVs > that you want > >> to load into some other product might be nice. > >> > > > > This is silly. You'd just COPY the particular table you > want, not use > > pg_dump. pg_dump's already got an unreasonably large number of > > options without adding ones that have essentially zero use. > Also, I > > think there are sufficient grounds to worry about whether a > CSV dump > > would always reload correctly --- we already know that > that's a poorly > > thought out "standard". > > > > > > > > Well, if you have dozens or hundreds of tables it might well be more > convenient. > > As for not reloading - I went to some trouble to make sure > that we could > reload what we dumped, exactly, unless the force options are used. I > might have made a bug in that, but it isn't dependent on the > particular > CSV format used. > > Naturally you won't have a use for it, but I suspect others might (in > which case they had better speak up ;-) ) > > I suppose the alternative would be to write a little tool in perl or > whatever to do the same thing for you. Maybe a good pgfoundry project. > > cheers > > andrew > > > ---------------------------(end of > broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
