I don't think we should define types based on how they print. We should define types based on what they contain. bytea is a perfectly good datatype for storing binary data, though perhaps we could use a bytea(n) for fixed size binary data.
However bytea has an inconvenient string representation. Really I would prefer if bytea were *always* read and written in hex format. We could have a guc to enable this but it would make it hard to write code which would function consistently as part of a larger application. I think this is more akin to the MONEY data type. Really it would be better if we could declare columns as NUMERIC but attach a "default format" to them for use when string representation is desired. Similarly with bytea we could choose a default string representation different from the default in/out functions. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's RemoteDBA services! -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
