Обсуждение: Discrepancy in --no-tablespaces behavior between Tar and Plain-text formats

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Discrepancy in --no-tablespaces behavior between Tar and Plain-text formats

От
tushar
Дата:
Hi,

I observed that pg_restore attempts to set default_tablespace from a Tar archive even if --no-tablespaces was used during pg_dump.

Please refer to this scenario:

[edb@1a1c15437e7c bin]$ ./psql postgres
psql (19devel)
Type "help" for help.
postgres=# \! mkdir /tmp/tbsp
postgres=# create tablespace a location '/tmp/tbsp';
CREATE TABLESPACE
postgres=#
postgres=# create table t(n int) tablespace a;
CREATE TABLE
postgres=# insert into t values (1);
INSERT 0 1
postgres=# \q
[edb@1a1c15437e7c bin]$ ./pg_dump  --no-tablespace -Ft -f tp.tar postgres 

Now, try to restore to another cluster 

[edb@1a1c15437e7c bin]$ ./pg_restore -Ft -C -d postgres -p 9000 tp.tar
pg_restore: error: could not execute query: ERROR:  database "postgres" already exists
Command was: CREATE DATABASE postgres WITH TEMPLATE = template0 ENCODING = 'UTF8' LOCALE_PROVIDER = libc LOCALE = 'C.UTF-8';


pg_restore: error: could not set "default_tablespace" to a: ERROR:  invalid value for parameter "default_tablespace": "a"
DETAIL:  Tablespace "a" does not exist.
pg_restore: warning: errors ignored on restore: 2
[edb@1a1c15437e7c bin]$ 

If we do like this - using -Fp format, then  no error 
./pg_dump  --no-tablespace -Fp -f tp.txt  postgres
\i tp.txt 

regards,

Re: Discrepancy in --no-tablespaces behavior between Tar and Plain-text formats

От
Nathan Bossart
Дата:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 04:13:11PM +0530, tushar wrote:
> I observed that pg_restore attempts to set default_tablespace from a Tar
> archive even if --no-tablespaces was used during pg_dump.

Correct.  The documentation for pg_dump --no-tablespaces states the
following:

    This option is ignored when emitting an archive (non-text) output file.
    For the archive formats, you can specify the option when you call
    pg_restore.

-- 
nathan





On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 8:43 PM Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 04:13:11PM +0530, tushar wrote:
> I observed that pg_restore attempts to set default_tablespace from a Tar
> archive even if --no-tablespaces was used during pg_dump.

Correct.  The documentation for pg_dump --no-tablespaces states the
following:

    This option is ignored when emitting an archive (non-text) output file.
    For the archive formats, you can specify the option when you call
    pg_restore.

Thanks for pointing that out. Since this appears to be the expected behavior, should we leave it as is rather than attempting to 'fix' or improve it? 
if --not-tablespace already specified at the time of pg_dump ( not sure why it is ignored; it should throw an error if not supported)  
then it makes sense that it wouldn't be necessary for pg_restore time, seems redundant.

regards,

Re: Discrepancy in --no-tablespaces behavior between Tar and Plain-text formats

От
Nathan Bossart
Дата:
On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 11:35:24AM +0530, tushar wrote:
> Thanks for pointing that out. Since this appears to be the expected
> behavior, should we leave it as is rather than attempting to 'fix' or
> improve it?
> if --not-tablespace already specified at the time of pg_dump ( not sure why
> it is ignored; it should throw an error if not supported)
> then it makes sense that it wouldn't be necessary for pg_restore time,
> seems redundant.

I'm not sure.  While I agree that it's a little weird, AFAICT it's behaved
this way for a long time, so changing it risks breaking existing scripts.
I suspect that trade-off is not worth it in this case.

-- 
nathan