Questions

Let us focus on some of the most important questions people often ask:

• Should everybody create dumps? Actually, no. Dumps are often used as backups and are therefore considered to be an administrative task. Therefore, a proper security system is needed to ensure that not everyone can read everything.
• Why are dumps so small? A binary copy is a lot larger because it contains the data “as it is” on disk. In a dump, things such as indexes are merely definitions, which are, of course, a lot smaller.
• Do you have to dump the globals too? Forgetting to dump globals is often a core problem. Make sure that you always have a copy of those globals around.
• Is it safe to have a .pgpass file? It is safe if you have made 100% sure that the directory containing .pgpass files is only readable by the desired user.

The answers to these questions can also be found in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-PostgreSQL-15-).

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