Re: Possible TODO item: copy to/from pipe

Andreas Pflug  writes:
> Forgot to mention:
> COPY COMPRESSED was also meant to introduce a portable format that's 
> efficient for both text and binary data. Relying on some external XYZzip 
> version seems not too portable to me.

I dislike putting this into the backend precisely because it's trying to
impose a one-size-fits-all compression solution.  Someone might wish to
use bzip2 instead of gzip, for instance, or tweak the compression level
options of gzip.  It's trivial for the user to do that if the
compression program is separate, not trivial at all if it's wired into
COPY.  Also, a pipe feature would have uses unrelated to compression,
such as on-the-fly analysis or generation of data.
		regards, tom lane