On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 10:30:35AM +0200, Csaba Nagy wrote: > On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 00:04, Jim C. Nasby wrote: > > I can't imagine how bad this would be if the database actually had > > hour-long reports that had to run... and luckily the system is quiet at > > night when pg_dump runs. > > BTW, pg_dump is the only thing that stays in my way with the CLUSTER > strategy against long running transactions, because it locks (in shared > mode, but that's just enough) all dumped tables at the beginning. It > would be nice to have an "exclude-table" option on it. I actually > started working on a patch to allow that, I will make it just good > enough for my purpose (very poor C skills here). Would that be > interesting for others ? Well, being able to have finer control over what you're dumping is on the TODO list, and I think there was even consensus reached on -hackers as to how the syntax should work. But that's only a partial fix, because generally you'd want a complete dump of your database anyway. What would be better is if pg_dump could release locks as it no longer needs them, namely as it dumps each table. Though this might require pg_dump remembering some state information about each object since certain things are dumped after all the COPY commands, such as RI. This also doesn't address the issue of long-running transactions preventing dead rows from being vacuumed. -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
