postgres/contrib/pg_dumplo

How to use pg_dumplo?
=====================

(c) 2000, Pavel Janík ml. <Pavel.Janik@linux.cz>


Q: How do you use pg_dumplo?
============================

A: This is a small demo of backing up the database table with Large Objects:


We will create a demo database and a small and useless table `lo' inside
it:

SnowWhite:$ createdb test
CREATE DATABASE

Ok, our database with the name 'test' is created. Now we should create demo
table which will contain only one column with the name 'id' which will hold
the oid number of Large Object:

SnowWhite:$ psql test
Welcome to psql, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Type:  \copyright for distribution terms
       \h for help with SQL commands
       \? for help on internal slash commands
       \g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
       \q to quit

test=# CREATE TABLE lo (id oid);
CREATE
test=# \lo_import /etc/aliases
lo_import 19338
test=# INSERT INTO lo VALUES (19338);
INSERT 19352 1
test=# select * from lo;
  id   
-------
 19338
(1 row)

test=# \q

In the above example you can see that we have also imported one "Large
Object" - the file /etc/aliases. It has an oid of 19338 so we have inserted
this oid number to the database table lo to the column id. The final SELECT
shows that we have one record in the table.

Now we can demonstrate the work of pg_dumplo. We will create dump directory
which will contain the whole dump of large objects (/tmp/dump):

mkdir -p /tmp/dump

Now we can dump all large objects from the database `test' which has an oid
stored in the column `id' in the table `lo':

SnowWhite:$ pg_dumplo -s /tmp/dump -d test -l lo.id
pg_dumplo: dump lo.id (1 large obj)

Voila, we have the dump of all Large Objects in our directory:

SnowWhite:$ tree /tmp/dump/
/tmp/dump/
`-- test
    |-- lo
    |   `-- id
    |       `-- 19338
    `-- lo_dump.index

3 directories, 2 files
SnowWhite:$ 

Isn't it nice :-) Yes, it is, but we are on the half of our way. We should
also be able to recreate the contents of the table lo and the Large Object
database when something went wrong. It is very easy, we will demonstrate
this via dropping the database and recreating it from scratch with
pg_dumplo:

SnowwWite:$ dropdb test
DROP DATABASE

SnowWhite:$ createdb test
CREATE DATABASE

Ok, our database with the name `test' is created again. We should also
create the table `lo' again:

SnowWhite:$ psql test
Welcome to psql, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Type:  \copyright for distribution terms
       \h for help with SQL commands
       \? for help on internal slash commands
       \g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
       \q to quit

test=# CREATE TABLE lo (id oid);
CREATE
test=# \q
SnowWhite:$

Now the database with the table `lo' is created again, but we do not have
any information stored in it. But have the dump of complete Large Object
database, so we can recreate the contents of the whole database from the
directory /tmp/dump:

SnowWhite:$ pg_dumplo -s /tmp/dump -d test -i
19338	lo	id	test/lo/id/19338
SnowWhite:$

And this is everything.

Summary: In this small example we have shown that pg_dumplo can be used to
completely dump the database's Large Objects very easily.