Re: [SQL] Fast Backups With pg_dump

Wayne Piekarski wrote:
> 
> Currently, I am running the pg_dump program every hour to produce backups
> of the database, and then storing them in case something fails or I need
> recover something.
> 
> However, the backups are quite large, and the CPU gets really thrashed a
> lot doing the COPY as it has to make lots of function calls (as mentioned
> in a previous email of mine to hackers) and I wanted to avoid this if
> possible.
> 
> What would be really neat is if you could do something like, give me a
> dump of all rows changed since the last backup, sortof like a diff file,
> so I make a full backup at the start of the day, and then just store
> deltas for the rest of the day. I know that postgres can keep track of
> this kind of stuff because the MVCC allows it to make a consistent
> snapshot of the dbms even while updates are occuring, so is this kind of
> idea possible (or does it already exist?)

I implement transaction logging for 6.6 - you will be able
to do incremental backup by copying log file.

Vadim