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Comment by warbiscuit | Hacker News Reader

Ah. That's a relief, I was a little worried. But that makes it strange that someone, knowing of this limitation, would choose to start with the xml dump format.

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I think the fact that this form of dump doesn't contain foreign keys is even more extraordinary.

What's the point of having a dump format that you can't use to restore your database properly?

Does it have a health warning advising that it's not a proper dump?

It contains the foreign key data, but not the constraint.

You get this:

    <field Field="course_id" Type="int(10)" Null="NO" Key="MUL"/>

But not this:

    CONSTRAINT `fk_courses_offered_class_details`
    FOREIGN KEY (`course_id`)
    REFERENCES `courses_offered` (`id`)

Well, I've had issues with pg_dump's standard format. It can't be directly used to restore a db, one must manually set it to dump a .bak or something else.

Not sure what you refer to here. All pg_dump formats should work for restoring a database. The only flaw in pg_dump that I know of is the mess if you want to dump an entire cluster of databases but still have one file per database.

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