Re: pg_restore ignores PGDATABASE

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 1:18 AM, Erik Rijkers <er@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Sun, February 19, 2012 06:27, Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Erik Rijkers <er@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>> pg_restore ignores environment variable PGDATABASE.
>>
>> What exactly do you mean by "ignores"?  pg_restore prints results to
>> standard output unless a database name is specified.  AFAIK, there's
>> no syntax to say "I want a direct-to-database restore to whatever you
>> think the default database is".
>
> That's right, and that seems contradictory with:
>
> "This utility [pg_restore], like most other PostgreSQL utilities, also uses the environment
> variables supported by libpq (see Section 31.13)."
>
> as pg_restore does 'ignore' (for want of a better word) PGDATABASE.
>
> But I think I can conclude from your reply that that behaviour is indeed intentional.

It is, because we want there to be a way of converting a custom or tar
format archive back to text.  I think that probably works out for the
best anyway, since pg_restore is a sufficiently dangerous operation
that you want to be darn sure you're not doing it on the wrong
database.  dropdb also requires a database name, while createdb does
not, for similar reasons...

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company