Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:17:36 -0300
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
To: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>
Cc: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>,
	Surafel Temesgen <surafel3000@gmail.com>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, vignesh C <vignesh21@gmail.com>,
	Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>,
	Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>
Subject: Re: proposal: possibility to read dumped table's name from file
Message-ID: <20201111151736.GA24124@alvherre.pgsql>
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On 2020-Nov-11, Pavel Stehule wrote:

> I think the proposed feature is very far to be the config file for pg_dump
> (it implements a option "--filter"). This is not the target. It is not
> designed for this. This is just an alternative for options like -t, -T, ...
> and I am sure so nobody will generate this file manually. Main target of
> this patch is eliminating problems with the max length of the command line.
> So it is really not designed to be the config file for pg_dump.

I agree that a replacement for existing command line arguments is a good
goal, but at the same time it's good to keep in mind the request that
more object types are supported as dumpable.  While it's not necessary
that this infrastructure supports all object types in the first cut,
it'd be good to have it support that.  I would propose that instead of a
single letter 't' etc we support keywords, maybe similar to those
returned by getObjectTypeDescription() (with additions -- for example
for "table data").  Then we can extend for other object types later
without struggling to find good letters for each.

Of course we could allow abbrevations for common cases, such that "t"
means "table".

For example: it'll be useful to support selective dumping of functions,
materialized views, foreign objects, etc.