Re: BUG #2781: database dump/restore problems

"Greg Peters" <gregpeters79@gmail.com> writes:
> As you can see, the primary key is exported as a bigint, with a separate
> section for the sequence. This differs to the way 8.1 dumps the same table
> below:

This is an intentional change that fixes a lot of corner cases such as
renamed sequences.  The former behavior looked simple, perhaps, but it
failed outright in too many scenarios.  See
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2006-08/msg00376.php
and preceding discussions in pgsql-hackers.

> I then tried to restore the DB dumped by 8.2b3 into 8.1, with no success. It
> didn't like the sequence part. This probably isn't so much a bug, but more a
> backwards compatibility issue.

We have never promised backward compatibility of pg_dump output to older
server versions.

            regards, tom lane