Yes. The entire dump is performed within a single transaction.
On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 9:24 AM, Michael Nolan <htfoot@gmail.com> wrote:
The documentation for pg_dump says that dump files are created in a consistent state.
Is that true across multiple tables in the same pg_dump command? (Obviously it would not be true if I dumped tables using separate pg_dump commands.
Yes. The entire dump is performed within a single transaction.
But if I put the database into a backup state using 'pg_start_backup', would separately executed pg_dump commands be in a consistent state across the set of dump files?)
pg_start_backup and pg_dump are not designed to work together. Namely, pg_start_backup is mostly concerned with making sure future writes are accounted for in the final backup while pg_dump says to ignore everything that happens after the command begins.
The documentation for pg_dumpall does not say that its dump file is in a consistent state (eg, across all tables), but it does say that it uses pg_dump to dump clusters. So, how consistent are the tables in pg_dumpall files?
Each database is internally consistent. There is no guarantee that databases and globals are consistent with each other (though those are typically seldom changed) but different databases will to represent the same point in time vis-a-vis each other.
You might want to describe what you are trying to do here.
David J.
I'm getting ready for a security audit and I want to make sure I have the database backup procedures properly documented, including what the limitations are on each type of backup . We us a combination of low level backups with log shipping, dumping of key individual tables, dumping of entire databases and dumping the entire system (pg_dumpall.) Hardware for setting up a slave server may be in a future budget, though I hope to be able to test having a slave server in the cloud later this year. (I'm not sure we have enough network bandwidth for that, hence the test.)
When I moved to a new release of pg (9.3) last December, I stopped all transaction processing first so that pg_dumpall had no consistency issues. --
