[ot] pg_restore > ascii dump size

[Raf]

Perly People,

I don't like postgres very much.

We had a really large database which wasn't being vacuumed.  We attempted
to perform a full vacuum on it and this stalled.  Taking an alternative
approach, we made a full pg_dump of the database and dropped the original.
Fine.  This dump, in ascii and uncompressed, totalled about 4GB; when
compared to the original 20GB (not my fault, I'm new here) being taken up
- one should get quite excited.

Fine.  Now we pg_restored that dump.  It's still restoring and the size of
the physical database now exceeds 15GB again.  This is from a 4GB dump.
I don't think that the DB is so badly designed that this would result from
badly chosen data types in the schema.

Not sure where this is coming from.  Has anyone ever seen this.  Would you
like to join the "I hate Postgres" society?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Raf