"James B. Byrne" <byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca> writes:
> I have recently had to teach myself how to use git and the thought came to me
> that this tool might provide a fairly low setup cost way of passing pg_dumps
> over the network to our off site data store. Think Rsync, but on a file
> content basis; just the content diff gets transmitted.
Huh? rsync does within-file diff transmission already.
> GiT works by compressing deltas of the contents of successive versions of file
> systems under repository control. It treats binary objects as just another
> object under control. The question is, are successive (compressed) dumps of
> an altered database sufficiently similar to make the deltas small enough to
> warrant this approach?
No. If you compress it, you can be pretty certain that the output will
be different from the first point of difference to the end of the file.
You'd have to work on uncompressed output, which might cost more than
you'd end up saving ...
regards, tom lane