Zurich, Switzerland - January 10th, 2024

pg_dumpbinary

pg_dumpbinary dumps a PostgreSQL database to a binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary, which is provided.

pg_dumpbinary 2.14 was released today, it adds two new options and fixes some bugs reported by users since last release.

• Add new option --with-child, when -t or -T options are used, to include or exclude child and partition tables. pg_dump will be used instead with options --table-and-children or --exclude-table-and-children. It requires PostgreSQL >= 16.
• Add -V, --verbose option that lists tables included in the dump.
• Add -A, --attach SNAPSHOT to be able to attach pg_dumpbinary to an existing snapshot instead of creating a dedicated one.
• Fix dump failure when sequences name have spaces.

A full list of changes and acknowledgments can be found here

pg_dumpbinary is useful when:

• You have bytea that can not be exported by pg_dump because the total size of the escape/hex output exceeds 1Gb.
• You have custom type that stores \0 internally in bytea but data are exported by pg_dump as char/varchar/text. In this case pg_dump truncates all data after the first '\0', resulting in data loss.
• Other cases where a binary output format is useful.

In these kinds of cases pg_dumpbinary helps by dumping the PostgreSQL database in a binary format. In all other cases the pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL are preferred.

See the documentation for a more complete description of available features.

Links & Credits

pg_dumpbinary is an Open Source project from LzLabs GmbH. Contributions and ideas are welcome. Send your ideas, features requests, or patches using GitHub's tools.

Links :

• Documentation: https://github.com/lzlabs/pg_dumpbinary/blob/master/README.md
• Download: https://github.com/lzlabs/pg_dumpbinary/releases/
• Support: use GitHub report tool at https://github.com/lzlabs/pg_dumpbinary/pg_dumpbinary/issues