Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> writes: > I know COPY doesn't support importing files with fixed column widths, > i.e. we can't say field1 is the first 30 characters, and field2 is the > rest of the line. We need a unique delimiter at column 31. (Commercial > Ingres does support this ability.)
> I know we tell most people to use sed, Perl, or an ETL tool to convert > files into a format COPY understands, and I think that is a reasonable > answer. However, the file_fdw also reads our COPY format, and in that > case, the data file might be updated regularly and running an ETL > process on it every time it is read is inconvenient. COPY is, and has always been intended to be, as fast as possible; loading format transformation abilities onto it seems like a fundamental mistake. Therefore, if you wish file_fdw were more flexible, I think the answer is to create a variant of file_fdw that doesn't use COPY but some other mechanism. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers