On 05/19/2010 08:13 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bernd Helmle <mailings@oopsware.de> writes:
>> --On 18. Mai 2010 23:20:26 +0200 Jesper Krogh <jesper@krogh.cc> wrote:
>>> May I ask whats the reason is for "breaking" the compatibillity?
>
>> "Efficency", if i am allowed to call it this way. The new hex
>> representation should be more efficient to retrieve and to handle than the
>> old one. I think bytea_output was set to hex for testing purposes on the
>> first hand, but not sure wether there was a consensus to leave it there
>> finally later.
>
> Yeah, we intentionally set it that way initially to help find stuff that
> needs to be updated (as DBD::Pg evidently does). It's still TBD whether
> 9.0.0 will ship with that default or not.
given how much faster the new format is (or rather how slow the old one
was) and the number of people I have seen complaining "why is bytea so
slow) I would like to see it staying turned on by default. However this
also depends on how quickly database driver developers can adapt.
Stefan