Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> writes:
> On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 15:22 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Well, for starters, using binary format. It is undeniable that that
>> creates more portability risks (cross-architecture and cross-PG-version
>> issues) than text format. Not everyone wants to take those risks for
>> benefits that may not be meaningful for their apps.
> What are the cross-architecture risks involved?
The biggie is floating-point format. IEEE standard is not quite
universal ... and even for platforms that fully adhere to that standard,
it's not entirely clear that we get the endianness issues correct.
There used to be platforms where FP and integer endianness were
different; is anyone sure that's no longer the case?
But I'll agree that cross-version hazards are a much more clear and
present danger. We've already broken binary compatibility at least once
since the current binary-I/O system was instituted (intervals now have
three fields not two) and there are obvious candidates for future
breakage, such as text locale/encoding support.
regards, tom lane