Hot logical backup of one database
Logical backup makes a copy of the data in the database by dumping the content of each table.
How to do it…
The command to do this is simple, as follows:
pg_dump -F c > dumpfile
Or, you can use the following command:
pg_dump –F c –f dumpfile
You can also do this through pgAdmin3, as shown in the following screenshot:
How it works…
The pg_dump utility produces a single output file. This output file can use the split command to separate the file into multiple pieces, if required.
The pg_dump archive file, also known as
custom format, is lightly compressed by default. Compression can be removed or made more aggressive.
pg_dump runs by executing SQL statements against the database to unload data. When PostgreSQL runs an SQL statement, we take a "snapshot" of currently running transactions, which freezes our viewpoint of the database. From version 9.3 onwards, pg_dump can take a parallel dump of a single database using the
snapshot export feature, introduced...
