Re: saving a view with pg_dump

On Sat, 2002-08-03 at 22:53, Johnson, Shaunn wrote:
>
> --Howdy
>
> --I'm looking at the page for restoration and I'm having a few
> problems.
>
> --In the docs, it suggest that I do the cat file* | psql database,
> but I get other errors with using the cat command
>
> [snip error]
> bash: /bin/cat: Argument list too long

You could say:

    for f in file*
    do
      psql -d database < $f
    done

or

    ls file* | xargs cat | psql -d database

but how do you come to have so many files defining the structure and
contents of a single database?  That looks very odd to me.  Or did you
just split it into too small chunks? (You should have used something
like "split -b 1900m" to make 1.9Gb chunks.)

> [/snip error]
>
> --I'm trying to do something like `ls -1` files* | psql database
> and I'm not getting any successful messages.

1.  That should be `ls -l files*` with the backticks enclosing the whole
command.  (You had file* above - which is right?)

2.  That would feed the output of ls -l into psql, which is not at all
what you want to do - it is a long directory listing, not SQL.

> --I got a few other errors ... I supposed I was thinking
> that the system files from before would be save and I wouldn't
> have to create those by hand (users, groups, etc).

If this is for a database upgrade, you should be using pg_dumpall to
dump all databases at once, and the users and groups as well. (Then
don't specify the database to psql when you restore.)

> --I know this seems silly, but, why can't I copy the original
> files back to the database directory after I've upgraded
> postgres?  doesn't that give you most of the same things
> (OID, system files, users, etc ... )?

pg_upgrade lets you do this, but its status is somewhat experimental.

--
Oliver Elphick                                Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight, UK
http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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