At 07:02 PM 2/11/02 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>To take just one problem: how do I know that
>the first line is metadata, and not data that happens to look exactly
>like whatever my metadata layout is?
You don't, which is why you need the 'WITH HEADER' or 'WITH ENCODING'
clause on COPY. I guess COPY could issue a warning when you do not say WITH
HEADER and it looks like a valid header.
Other than that, it's a case of storing information about the dumped data,
not the database schema in the data file. I'm not particularly attached to
the column names being there, but it does seem usefull to store
instructions indicating the the file is formatted.
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