On Apr 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM, Stephen Denne wrote:
I had an annoying experience with COPY within psql yesterday.I had a dump of just three tables, which I wanted to investigate. I tried loading them into an empty database, using psql's \i command.The table creation failed as dependent tables/sequences where absent. The copy command failed as the tables did not exist.The data intended as the input to the copy statement resulted in a large number of error messages.My idea to avoid this situation is to add an option to COPY that tells it not to throw an error until it runs out of input data.This will not solve the problem, since again it only works if the COPYcommand gets to execution
I brought this up because of a very similar problem a coworker ran into. He did a pg_dumpall and tried to restore it into an existing cluster. One of the tables already existed and didn't have the same columns, so the copy command ran and then failed. And then all hell broke lose. :) This was on 8.1, which AFAIK is using the v3 protocol, so it's still an issue.
I can see that there would be a problem if you wrapped the dump into a transaction and something up-stream of the copy failed... I'm not sure on a good way to handle that, perhaps other than switching to \COPY.
-- Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect [EMAIL PROTECTED] Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
