pg_dumpbinary v2.17 for PostgreSQL has been released. The release introduces two new options to the command pg_restorebinary: -C, which creates a database before restoring, and --dump-create, which prints the creation and alteration statements.

pg_dumpbinary v2.17 released

pg_dumpbinary dumps a PostgreSQL database to a binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary, which is provided.

This release adds two new options to command pg_restorebinary:

• Add option -C, --create to pg_restorebinary to create the database before restoring into it. Like with pg_restore you must provide a database to connect using the -d option.
• Add --dump-create to print to stdout the create and alter database statements.

pg_dumpbinary is useful when:

• You have bytea that can not be exported by pg_dump because the total size of the escape/hex output exceeds 1Gb.
• You have custom type that stores \0 internally in bytea but data are exported by pg_dump as char/varchar/text. In this case pg_dump truncates all data after the first \0, resulting in data loss.
• Other cases where a binary output format is useful.

In these kinds of cases pg_dumpbinary helps by dumping the PostgreSQL database in a binary format. In all other cases the pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL are preferred.

See the documentation for a more complete description of available features.

pg_dumpbinary v2.17 released