Dave, I share your concerns about this functionality. In fact last month I wrote the following in response to a patch to this functionality.
I wouldn't mind this being pulled out of the main code line for now and moved to contrib until it becomes more robust. >>Robert, >> >> >>Thanks for the patch. While I didn't review it too closely, what I >>saw seemed fine. >> >>However, I have concerns about the feature as a whole, which really >>has nothing to do with your patch. >> >>I don't like the approach taken here for serialization. It seems to >>me that this is a half baked attempt to reimplement native java >>serialization. Why not just use java serialization to do what it was >>intended for? We could then store the results of the serialization in >>a bytea column, or a LargeObject, or even in a separate table as is >>done here. However, I am unsure of the desireabilty of creating these >>additional tables. The bigest reason I don't like the additional >>tables is that the serialized objects don't ever get deleted. >> >>To the extent that this is documented, I think the feature should be >>marked as experimental with a caution that it may be changed in major >>non-backwardly compatible ways in the future. >> >>thanks, >>--Barry There are two areas in the current code that I am uncomfortable with. This serialize code and the code in org/postgresql/xa. Have you looked at the xa code? thanks, --Barry Dave Cramer wrote: > While fixing the handling of "unknown" data type in the result set I was > faced with wading through the Serialize code. > > I am wondering if this is really a required/desireable feature? > > How many people out there are actually using it? > > Do we need/want it? > > My thoughts are: > > 1) There are plenty of persistence layers which do this job much better. > > 2) I don't think this belongs in a driver. > 3) The code will be simpler. > > Dave > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])