When Heroku creates a dump file of your Postgres database it uses the -Fc
option
It is equivalent to running
pg_dump -Fc -d name_of_db > name_of_db.dump
This command will let you import your database with the pg_restore
command
pg_restore -d name_of_database name_of_db.dump
If you use pg_dump
without the -Fc
flag you will have to cat the contents of the file to psql
pg_dump -d name_of_db > name_of_db.dump
cat name_of_db.dump | psql name_of_db
This approach is just executing SQL statements. Whereas the former approach is better for working with larger databases that benefit from compressing the file size.
Just finishing up brewing up some fresh ground comments...