Re: pg_dump --pretty-print-views

On 01/10/2013 07:23 AM, Marko Tiikkaja wrote:
> 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).
>
>

For versions >= 9.2 it would be better to allow passing in a 
pretty-print value, like 80 or 0, instead of just passing 'true'. The 
new line-wrapping that the integer argument triggers is much more 
readable than the supposedly pretty value that 'true' provides.

cheers

andrew