Patch: Using --no-comments with pg_dump

Recently I submitted a patch for review that allows a non-superuser to practically use a backup taken from pg_dump.

Currently it is a kludge (and well known at that - Ref 1 / Ref 2 / Ref 3 / Ref 4) but since it's (the ideal solution) too big a byte to chew and not in high-demand, it has seen little to no traction in the past decade.

This patch should allow the above. But more importantly, it should also allow regular users of AWS RDS Postgres as well as Google Cloud Postgres databases (who do not get SuperUser access by-design) to reliably use the backups, instead of tinkering with the backup SQLs and remove things like COMMENT ON EXTENSION for it to even run during restoration.

The bad news is that since Postgres 10 has already branched off, I doubt this would see the light of the day (if at all) any time before Postgres 11 (unless there is consensus that it's helpful enough and gets 'back-patched' to Postgres 10 to be released around September 2017).

Update (3rd Oct 2017):
This is now a part of my PsqlForks branch. You can check the related commit here.

Update (26th Jan 2018):
This is now part of the official Postgres v11 branch. You can check the related commit here.

Using pg_dumpall with Google Cloud Postgres

Luckily the recent update to pg_dumpall works (without any extra effort) to dump Globals off the recently launched Google Cloud PostgreSQL service well.

This is because this Postgres service seems to be using the same limitation (as AWS RDS Postgres does) in that none of the user accounts are SuperUser in the Postgres sense. Therefore, this platform too disallows accessing pg_authid.

The fallback here too, is to use pg_roles to read (as much as is possible) to dump Role related Globals. Read here for more info on the recent changes to pg_dumpall that makes this work.