* Luke Lonergan (llonergan@greenplum.com) wrote:
> On 12/2/05 12:18 PM, "Stephen Frost" <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > Just a thought, but couldn't psql be made to use the binary mode of
> > libpq and do at least some of the conversion on the client side? Or
> > does binary mode not work with copy (that wouldn't suprise me, but
> > perhaps copy could be made to support it)?
>
> Yes - I think this idea is implicit in what David suggested, and my response
> as well. The problem is that the way the client does conversions can
> potentially differ from the way the backend does. Some of the types in
> Postgres are machine intrinsic and the encoding conversions use on-machine
> libraries, each of which preclude the use of client conversion methods
> (without a lot of restructuring). We'd tackled this problem in the past and
> concluded that the parse / convert stage really belongs in the backend.
I've used the binary mode stuff before, sure, Postgres may have to
convert some things but I have a hard time believing it'd be more
expensive to do a network_encoding -> host_encoding (or toasting, or
whatever) than to do the ascii -> binary change.
Thanks,
Stephen