"Gordan Bobic" <gordan@freeuk.com> writes:
> More to the point, what would be a reason for not using bytea to
> replace BLOBs completely?
The fact that encoding/decoding is a pain in the neck :-(. The
lo_read/lo_write interfaces are a relatively convenient way to send
and receive binary data, but the ASCII input-output representation that
bytea uses is not.
We really need some binary-friendly data transmission interface like
lo_read/lo_write for bytea fields before they will be ready to take over
the world. I think Jan has some ideas about how to do that, but it's
not done yet.
regards, tom lane