On Oct 25, 2005, at 6:32 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> kgeis@speakeasy.net writes:
>> The second section has an unnecessarily complex query that caused me
>> problems because pg_database contains a column of type aclitem[] which
>> does not support binary transfer from the database.
>
> Say what?
>
> The proposed change is probably a good idea anyway, primarily because
> there isn't necessarily any template1 database. But if fetching
> aclitem[] fails then there's something quite wrong, and I don't believe
> it's on the server side.
>
> regards, tom lane
aclitem is one of few types that does not have send and receive
functions defined. According to the docs for "CREATE TYPE," "If this
function is not supplied, the type cannot participate in binary
output." The problem came up for me because I am implementing binary
data transfer in the JDBC driver, and my first draft assumes that all
data transfers are binary. I worked around it elsewhere by converting
it to a string within SQL (curiously, I couldn't cast it to text, but I
could call array_to_string on an aclitem[]).
Ken