The Problem: Occassionally a DBA needs to dump a database to a new
encoding. In instances where the current encoding, (or lack of an
encoding, like SQL_ASCII) is poorly supported on the target database
server, it can be useful to dump into a particular encoding. But,
currently the only way to set the encoding of a pg_dump file is to
change client_encoding in postgresql.conf and restart postmaster.
This is more than a little awkward for production systems.