25.1. SQL Dump

pg_dump dbname > dumpfile

Text files created by pg_dump are intended to be read in by the psql program. The general command form to restore a dump is

psql dbname < dumpfile

where dumpfile is the file output by the pg_dump command. The database dbname will not be created by this command, so you must create it yourself from template0 before executing psql (e.g., with createdb -T template0 dbname ). psql supports options similar to pg_dump for specifying the database server to connect to and the user name to use. See the psql reference page for more information. Non-text file dumps are restored using the pg_restore utility.

Before restoring an SQL dump, all the users who own objects or were granted permissions on objects in the dumped database must already exist. If they do not, the restore will fail to recreate the objects with the original ownership and/or permissions. (Sometimes this is what you want, but usually it is not.)

By default, the psql script will continue to execute after an SQL error is encountered. You might wish to run psql with the ON_ERROR_STOP variable set to alter that behavior and have psql exit with an exit status of 3 if an SQL error occurs:

psql --set ON_ERROR_STOP=on dbname < dumpfile

Either way, you will only have a partially restored database. Alternatively, you can specify that the whole dump should be restored as a single transaction, so the restore is either fully completed or fully rolled back. This mode can be specified by passing the -1 or --single-transaction command-line options to psql . When using this mode, be aware that even a minor error can rollback a restore that has already run for many hours. However, that might still be preferable to manually cleaning up a complex database after a partially restored dump.

The ability of pg_dump and psql to write to or read from pipes makes it possible to dump a database directly from one server to another, for example:

pg_dump -h host1 dbname | psql -h host2 dbname

After restoring a backup, it is wise to run ANALYZE on each database so the query optimizer has useful statistics; see Section 24.1.3 and Section 24.1.6 for more information. For more advice on how to load large amounts of data into PostgreSQL efficiently, refer to Section 14.4 .

pg_dump dumps only a single database at a time, and it does not dump information about roles or tablespaces (because those are cluster-wide rather than per-database). To support convenient dumping of the entire contents of a database cluster, the pg_dumpall program is provided. pg_dumpall backs up each database in a given cluster, and also preserves cluster-wide data such as role and tablespace definitions. The basic usage of this command is:

pg_dumpall > dumpfile

The resulting dump can be restored with psql :

psql -f dumpfile postgres

(Actually, you can specify any existing database name to start from, but if you are loading into an empty cluster then postgres should usually be used.) It is always necessary to have database superuser access when restoring a pg_dumpall dump, as that is required to restore the role and tablespace information. If you use tablespaces, make sure that the tablespace paths in the dump are appropriate for the new installation.

pg_dumpall works by emitting commands to re-create roles, tablespaces, and empty databases, then invoking pg_dump for each database. This means that while each database will be internally consistent, the snapshots of different databases are not synchronized.

Cluster-wide data can be dumped alone using the pg_dumpall --globals-only option. This is necessary to fully backup the cluster if running the pg_dump command on individual databases.

Some operating systems have maximum file size limits that cause problems when creating large pg_dump output files. Fortunately, pg_dump can write to the standard output, so you can use standard Unix tools to work around this potential problem. There are several possible methods:

Use compressed dumps. You can use your favorite compression program, for example gzip :

pg_dump dbname | gzip > filename.gz

Reload with:

gunzip -c filename.gz | psql dbname

or:

cat filename.gz | gunzip | psql dbname

Use split . The split command allows you to split the output into smaller files that are acceptable in size to the underlying file system. For example, to make 2 gigabyte chunks:

pg_dump dbname | split -b 2G - filename

Reload with:

cat filename* | psql dbname

If using GNU split , it is possible to use it and gzip together:

pg_dump dbname | split -b 2G --filter='gzip > $FILE.gz'

It can be restored using zcat .

Use pg_dump 's custom dump format. If PostgreSQL was built on a system with the zlib compression library installed, the custom dump format will compress data as it writes it to the output file. This will produce dump file sizes similar to using gzip , but it has the added advantage that tables can be restored selectively. The following command dumps a database using the custom dump format:

pg_dump -Fc dbname > filename

A custom-format dump is not a script for psql , but instead must be restored with pg_restore , for example:

pg_restore -d dbname filename

See the pg_dump and pg_restore reference pages for details.

For very large databases, you might need to combine split with one of the other two approaches.

Use pg_dump 's parallel dump feature. To speed up the dump of a large database, you can use pg_dump 's parallel mode. This will dump multiple tables at the same time. You can control the degree of parallelism with the -j parameter. Parallel dumps are only supported for the "directory" archive format.

pg_dump -j num -F d -f out.dir dbname

You can use pg_restore -j to restore a dump in parallel. This will work for any archive of either the "custom" or the "directory" archive mode, whether or not it has been created with pg_dump -j .