Re: Dump version issues

On 4/23/25 11:46, Pawel Veselov wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> Was trying to import a database from a cloud deployment, and ran into this.
> 
> Exported the database with:
> * pg_dump (PostgreSQL) 12.20 (Ubuntu 12.20-0ubuntu0.20.04.1)

Are you sure about the above?

Version 1.16 is what you get from a Postgres 17 dump file.

If the client OS you are using is Ubuntu and you used the 
postgresql-common install it may dump using the latest installed version 
of pg_dump. If you have  Postgres 17 installed then that will be used.

To specify a pg_dump version do something like:

pg_dump --cluster 16/main

Assuming you have the default main cluster created.

pg_lsclusters will help show what Postgres instances are installed and 
what the cluster names are.


> * RDS PostgreSQL 12.19 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC)
> 7.3.1 20180712 (Red Hat 7.3.1-12), 64-bit
> 
> This produced a dump file of version 1.16, at least according to 'file'.
> 
> Trying to import the same dump on another (Fedora) machine, tried:
> * pg_restore (PostgreSQL) 12.22 <- from PGDG
> * pg_restore (PostgreSQL) 16.8 <- from Fedora
> 
> Both complain that they can't process the dump because dump version
> 1.16 is not supported.
> Both packages are latest from their respective repositories.
> 
> I'm not sure whether the server has any say in the version of the dump
> file, I assume it doesn't.
> 
> So, how come older software (according to versions) produces dump
> files with a greater version
> than the newer software can understand? Is this Ubuntu package
> maintainers messing things up?
> 
> Given a pg_dump, it would be nice if its "-V" output would say which
> version of the dump it would produce,
> and a pg_restore - what's the max (and min, if that's a thing) version
> of the dump that it will accept.
> That would be just super-helpful in finding the right combination of tools.
> 
> I ended up running PGDG's 16 pg_dump ((PostgreSQL) 16.8 (Ubuntu
> 16.8-1.pgdg22.04+1))
> on Ubuntu, which produced a 1.15-0 dump.
> 
> Thank you,
>    Pawel.
> 
> 

-- 
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@aklaver.com