gpbackup binary backup support

[CC-Hsu]

Hi,

As far as I know, GPDB supports COPY ... WITH (FORMAT BINARY) option, which might be faster than normal text file output. https://gpdb.docs.pivotal.io/latest/ref_guide/sql_commands/COPY.html

And it seems that gpbackup utilize COPY ... ON SEGMENT command under the hood.

Maybe gpbackup team can consider to support --binary option for gpbackup.

Best Regards.

[jimmyyih]

Hello,

Thanks, this is something that can be considered... although I'm not quite convinced at how much gpbackup would gain from having this option. We would need to ponder why pg_dump has not introduced the option to do binary format COPY. I imagine it is because of concern over portability.

From Postgres documentation for reference:

The binary format option causes all data to be stored/read as binary format rather than as text. It is somewhat faster than the text and CSV formats, but a binary-format file is less portable across machine architectures and PostgreSQL versions. Also, the binary format is very data type specific; for example it will not work to output binary data from a smallint column and read it into an integer column, even though that would work fine in text format.

- Jimmy