Tom Lane wrote:
> 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.
But isn't that an argument *for* having support for the binary format in
libpq in a form similar to what this patch offers? Then at least you'd
be safe as long as your libpq-version is >= your server version.
Currently, there seems to be no safe way to use the binary format,
despite it's benefits for moving around large amounts of data.
regards, Florian Pflug