Re: Simple row serialization?

Ivan Voras wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to implement some simple data logging via triggers on a small 
> number of infrequently updated tables and I'm wondering if there are 
> some helpful functions, plugins or idioms that would serialize a row 
> (received for example in a AFTER INSERT trigger) into a string that 
> I'd store in the log table. There's a limited number of field types 
> involved: varchars, integers and booleans. I'm not looking for 
> anything fancy, comma-separated string result will be just fine; Even 
> better, something like a dictionary ("field_name":"field_value",...) 
> would be nice. The reason for trying to do it this way is that I don't 
> want to create separate log tables for every table I wish to log.

Why not create the audit tables with composite types rather than strings?
   create table audit_foo_table as (who text, when timestamptz, old 
foo, new foo);

Or you could use an hstore (see contrib).

Or you could possibly use some of the XML support in 8.3 for serialization.


This is a usage question, so it really doesn't belong on -hackers.

cheers

andrew