Restoring 7.4 "pg_dumpall -o" output in 8.1 fails

gson@gson.org (Andreas Gustafsson) writes:

I recently attempted to upgrade a PostgreSQL 7.4 installation to 8.1 by
following the instructions at
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/install-upgrading.html&gt;,
having used "pg_dumpall -o" to dump the data in 7.4. When I tried to
restore the data in 8.1, psql reported a large number of syntax
errors.

Try making the dump from the 7.4 server using 8.1's pg_dump(all).

If you've already wiped the 7.4 installation then you'll have to deal
with the incompatibilities yourself. It looked like setting
default_with_oids to true in the 8.1 server would help (although do you
*really* need to preserve OIDs in your dump? That -o switch is pretty
well deprecated these days). The "cannot delete from a view" is
probably coming from an attempt to "DELETE FROM pg_shadow", which you
can ignore. You didn't show us any other problems.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:

Try making the dump from the 7.4 server using 8.1's pg_dump(all).

If you've already wiped the 7.4 installation then you'll have to deal
with the incompatibilities yourself. It looked like setting
default_with_oids to true in the 8.1 server would help (although do you
*really* need to preserve OIDs in your dump? That -o switch is pretty
well deprecated these days). The "cannot delete from a view" is
probably coming from an attempt to "DELETE FROM pg_shadow", which you
can ignore. You didn't show us any other problems.

What I did was to reinstall 7.4, which successfully restored the dump.

I don't think I actually need to preserve OIDs; I was using the -o
option out of habit, having been recommended to use it at some point.
In any case, that's not the point; I'm not looking for support or
workarounds, but simply to have the bug fixed. Whether or not I need
to preserve OIDs, the documented upgrade procedure for the case where
OIDs do need to preserved is not working, and that clearly is a bug in
either PostgreSQL itself or the documentation.
--
Andreas Gustafsson, gson@gson.org

ls -l

total 282
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jliang wheel 210873 Aug 10 10:54 pg_dump
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jliang wheel 57452 Aug 10 10:54 pg_dumpall
These are pg_dump(all) executable from postgresql-8.1.4
I copied them onto my postgresql-7.4.2 server and chmod to executable.
---(postgres@iguard)--(11:05:06AM)-- (/db/pg_backup)

/usr/local/pg8.1.4/pg_dumpall -o |gzip > db.out.gz

su: /usr/local/pg8.1.4/pg_dumpall: cannot execute binary file

/usr/local/pg8.1.4/pg_dump -t languages urldb > test

su: /usr/local/pg8.1.4/pg_dump: cannot execute binary file
User postgres have full permission under /db/pg_backup, so I don't know
how you could use 8.1's pg_dump(all) on 7.4 server.

Jie Liang

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-bugs-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-bugs-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Tom Lane
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 8:08 AM
To: Andreas Gustafsson
Cc: pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [BUGS] Restoring 7.4 "pg_dumpall -o" output in 8.1 fails

gson@gson.org (Andreas Gustafsson) writes:

I recently attempted to upgrade a PostgreSQL 7.4 installation to 8.1
by following the instructions at
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/install-upgrading.html

,

having used "pg_dumpall -o" to dump the data in 7.4. When I tried to
restore the data in 8.1, psql reported a large number of syntax
errors.

Try making the dump from the 7.4 server using 8.1's pg_dump(all).

If you've already wiped the 7.4 installation then you'll have to deal
with the incompatibilities yourself. It looked like setting
default_with_oids to true in the 8.1 server would help (although do you
*really* need to preserve OIDs in your dump? That -o switch is pretty
well deprecated these days). The "cannot delete from a view" is
probably coming from an attempt to "DELETE FROM pg_shadow", which you
can ignore. You didn't show us any other problems.

regards, tom lane

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