Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
>
> Why don't we just add an option to pg_dump --use-compress-program, just
> like tar and then people can use their "compression algorithm of the
> week" and we don't need to care about the licence or anything.
>
> It's not like the case of TOAST where it actually needs to be builtin.
> Tar doesn't have any compression builtin, yet you don't see many
> uncompressed tar files...
>
>
>
tar compresses/decompresses the whole archive via a single pipe. pg_dump
compresses individual data members. If the compression isn't builtin it
will make life much more difficult, and probably make parallel restore
as well as some other operations well nigh impossible.
cheers
andrew