>>>though I'd be worried about the portability price paid to have one. Or
>>>are you concerned about whether a GUI could invoke it? I don't see why
>>>not --- the GUIs don't reimplement pg_dump, do they?
>
> Actually Tom, I think they do (where they have an export facility). How would
> you run pg_dump on a remote machine? (well, without building an RPC
> mechanism)
In phpPgAdmin 2.x, such a re-implementation did exist. When we did the
3.2 rewrite, I wrote another one just for dumping tables. Then I had
the much better idea of just allowing the person to specify the location
of pg_dump on their server and now we stream raw pg_dump output back to
the client browser.
Chris