PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 3rd Edition

Appendix B. PostgreSQL Packaged Command-Line Tools

This appendix summarizes indispensable command-line tools packaged with PostgreSQL server. We discussed them at length in the book. Here we list their help messages. We hope to save you a bit of time with their inclusion and perhaps make this book a not-so-strange bedfellow.

Database Backup Using pg_dump

Use pg_dump to back up all or part of a database. Backup file formats available are TAR, compressed (PostgreSQL custom format), plain text, and plain-text SQL. Plain-text backup can copy psql-specific commands; therefore, restore by running the file within psql. A plain-text SQL backup is merely a file with standard SQL CREATE and INSERT commands. To restore, you can run the file using psql or pgAdmin. Example B-1 shows the pg_dump help output. For full coverage of pg_dump usage, see “Selective Backup Using pg_dump”.

Example B-1. pg_dump help

pg_dump --help

pg_dump dumps a database as a text file or to other formats.
Usage:
pg_dump [OPTION]... [DBNAME]

General options:
-f, --file=FILENAME         output file or directory name
-F, --format=c|d|t|p        output file format (custom, directory, tar, plain
text)
-j, --jobs=NUM              use this many parallel jobs to dump
-v, --verbose               verbose mode
-Z, --compress=0-9          compression level for compressed formats
--lock-wait-timeout=TIMEOUT fail after waiting TIMEOUT for a table lock
--no-sync                    do not wait for changes to be written safely to disk  --help show this help, then exit --version output version information, then ...