Question

My intention is to dump a database using:

pg_dump -U postgres -h localhost -p 5432 MYDB | gzip > database_dump.gz

And to restore it onto another environment with:

gunzip -c database_dump.gz | ssh 10.10.10.10 \
  psql -1 -U postgres -h localhost -p 5432 MYDB

Before I restore the database on the second environment, I’m going to drop the existing database to make way for the new dump (containing newer data).

Here’s my question: Do I need to specify the -C parameter in my pg_dump statement so that the outputted dump file contains a CREATE DATABASE statement? I noticed that without the parameter, the dump file does not contain the CREATE DATABASE statement.

According to the 9.1 docs for the -C parameter, “This option is only meaningful for the plain-text format. For the archive formats, you can specify the option when you call pg_restore.” I’m not positive what that means. As you can see above, I’m restoring using psql and not pg_restore.

Answer 1

It means that using psql for recreating your database, you need to add -C.

pg_restore is a tool specifically for restoring databases from scripts generated by pg_dump in non-plaintext format. You can’t use it interactively like psql. On the other hand, you have options for listing the objects in the archive and selecting which ones need to be restored. Another useful option is setting the number of concurrent jobs for processing the archive. In certain cases this can speed up restoring very much.

If you don’t specify the output format for pg_dump using the -F option, it will create a plaintext archive for you.