Usually a dump is significantly smaller than a live database due to space taken up by indexes and discarded tuples from MVCC. If it's significantly smaller you may also want to take a look at your vacuuming procedure. But I'm not sure database_size() is. Jason Minion jason.minion@xxxxxxxxxx ________________________________ From: pgsql-admin-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pgsql-admin-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of mcelroy, tim Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 4:06 PM To: 'pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: Re: [ADMIN] dbsize & pg_dump Please disregard this question. I'm using pg_dump -F c which compresses the data a it backs it up. Tim -----Original Message----- From: pgsql-admin-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pgsql-admin-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of mcelroy, tim Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 4:40 PM To: 'pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: [ADMIN] dbsize & pg_dump Good afternoon, Probably an easy question but why are the file sizes differ so much between these two tools? For example: A backup using pg_dump of our largest DB creates a file 384MB in size Using the following SQL code utilizing dbsize I get the following: FIX1=# SELECT D1.pg_size_pretty AS "FIX1_DB_SIZE" FIX1-# FROM (SELECT pg_size_pretty(database_size('FIX1'))) D1; FIX1_DB_SIZE -------------- 3832 MB (1 row) Is it safe to assume that pg_dump does a compression of the data? Thanks Tim
