pg_dumpbinary is a program used to dump a PostgreSQL database with data dumped in binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary that is provided with this tool.
pg_dumpbinary 2.3 was released today. This release fixes the setting of sequences values after restoring data from binary a dump where sequences values from PostgreSQL extensions was not restored.
pg_dumpbinary is useful in some particular situations:
you have bytea that can not be exported by pg_dump because the total size of the escape/hex output exceed 1Gb.
you have custom type that stores \0 internally in bytea but data are returned as char/varchar/text which truncate data after the '\0'. In this case pg_dump will export data in the output type which will result in data lost.
any other case where binary format can be useful.
If you are in this case pg_dumpbinary will help you by dumping the PostgreSQL database in binary format. In all other cases you must use the pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL.
See documentation for a complete description of the features.
Links & Credits
pg_dumpbinary is an open project from LzLabs (https://www.lzlabs.com/). Any contribution to build a better tool is welcome. You just have to send your ideas, features requests or patches using the GitHub tools.
