Ken Tanzer <ken.tanzer@gmail.com> writes:
>> FWIW, the business with making and editing a list file should work just
>> fine with a tar-format dump, not only with a custom-format dump. The
>> metadata is all there in either case.
> The pg_dump doc page kinda suggests but doesn't quite say that you can't
> re-order tar files; between that and the error message I gave up on that
> possibility. Are you suggesting it should work?
[ sorry for slow response ]
Ah, right: you can reorder simple object declarations, but you can't
change the relative order in which TABLE DATA objects are restored.
This is because the code doesn't support seeking in the tar file,
so it has to either read or skip each table-data subfile as it comes
to it.
It seems to me that that's just a small matter of programming to fix,
but few people use the tar format so nobody's bothered.
regards, tom lane