Hi,
At the company I work for, we've been splitting dumps into separate
files and diffing them for a while now. By far the biggest problem we
had was with views: pg_dump by default dumps views on one line, in a
format which maximizes compatibility. Now this has several problems for
our use case:
1) The one-line equivalent of a 200-line view is completely impossible
to read.
2) If there's a difference between the two dumped view definitions,
it takes a long time to find where and what exactly it is.
3) For some reason some expressions are dumped differently depending
on how exactly they are written, cluttering the diff with false
positives.
While we can do the actual splitting of objects from a -Fc dump
relatively easily, we can't fix the view definitions after they've been
dumped. So I'm proposing a --pretty-print-views setting to pg_dump
(patch attached).
Any feedback is welcome.
Regards,
Marko Tiikkaja