It looked like the tables were being backed up in alphanumeric order, but now I see that table "docformat" is being dumped after "doc_image".
Are there some other rules besides alphabetical sorting?
Is there some concern about the order? Lower case f comes after _ in ascii.
I'm tracking the progress of a very long backup, and the spreadsheet I using (and gnu sort, too, and IIRC Postgres' own ORDER BY) sort based on the current locale (en_US), whereas pg_dump sorts based on the C locale. Thus, things aren't as I expected.
The only time it could possibly matter is on restore when there are references for foreign keys, but on a restore those are all done after the data is restored.