Thread: pg_dump --with-* options

I'm looking at the new in PG18 pg_dump --with-* options, and I'm having 
trouble understanding them.  (I did not look into the source code or the 
git or mailing list history for this, to try to understand it as a user.)

We have

   -a, --data-only      dump only the data, not the schema or statistics
   --no-data            do not dump data
   --with-data          dump the data  # this one is new

(and there is also --section=data), and then three analogous options for 
"schema" and "statistics".

What is the purpose of the --with-data option?  Dumping the data is the 
default.  Is this to override an earlier --no-data option?

The man page is only minimally more verbose: "Dump data. This is the 
default."  But why do you then need this option?

I think we should add some more documenting detail for these, but right 
now I don't know what it would be.

On Fri, Jun 06, 2025 at 09:14:32AM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> We have
> 
>   -a, --data-only      dump only the data, not the schema or statistics
>   --no-data            do not dump data
>   --with-data          dump the data  # this one is new
> 
> (and there is also --section=data), and then three analogous options for
> "schema" and "statistics".
> 
> What is the purpose of the --with-data option?  Dumping the data is the
> default.  Is this to override an earlier --no-data option?

I believe the idea is that these will allow folks to be explicit about what
they want instead of needing to understand the defaults for every
component.

-- 
nathan