"Daniel Verite" <dan...@manitou-mail.org> writes: > One reason of adding the format to COPY is that it's where users > are looking for it. It's the canonical way of importing contents > from files so that's where it makes more sense.
I'm not sure I buy that argument, because it could be used to justify adding absolutely any ETL functionality to COPY. And we don't want to go down that path; the design intention for COPY is that it be as simple and fast as possible. >> And I am still waiting for a non-psql use case. But I don't expect to >> see one, precisely because most clients have no difficulty at all in >> handling binary data. > You mean small or medium-size binary data. The 512MB-1GB range is > impossible to handle if requested in text format, which is what drivers > tend to use. Even pg_dump fails on these contents. ... which is COPY. I do not see that RAW mode is going to help much here: it's not going to be noticeably better than COPY BINARY in terms of maximum field width. >> Code that uses PQexecParams() binary "resultFormat", or the >> binary format of copy doesn't have that problem, but most >> client-side drivers don't do that. > And maybe they just can't realistically, because getting result > format in binary is exposed as an all-or-nothing choice in libpq. That's simply wrong. Read the documentation for PQexecParams and friends: you can specify text or binary per-column. It's COPY that has the only-one-column-format restriction, and RAW certainly isn't going to make that better. I'm not quite as convinced as Andrew that RAW mode is unnecessary, but I don't find these arguments for it to be very compelling. The real issue to my mind is that it doesn't seem like we can shoehorn a sanely-defined version of RAW into the existing protocol spec without creating compatibility hazards. So we can either wait for the mythical protocol v4 (but even a protocol update wouldn't fix the application-level hazards) or we can treat it as a problem to be solved client-side. 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