Re: offline consistency check and info on attributes

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> Excerpts from Tomas Vondra's message of mar abr 26 17:39:19 -0300 2011:
>> Dne 25.4.2011 18:16, Alvaro Herrera napsal(a):
>> I think I'll move the integrity check to the db, so that it's possible
>> to check the column lengths etc. (pageinspect seems like a good module
>> to mutilate in this direction) but I still believe it'd be useful to
>> have an offline tool for basic checks. Would pg_filedump be a resonable
>> tool to do that?

> No, I don't think pg_filedump is a good host for such checks.  If we're
> going to have a tool to do that it'd be better to be able to include it in
> core (or at least contrib), and we can't have pg_filedump in there for
> licensing reasons.

Quite aside from licensing reasons, pg_filedump is only meant to print
out a very low-level representation of file contents; it has little
real understanding of what it's printing.  So I think it's a bad basis
for a verification utility on technical grounds too.
        regards, tom lane