I don't think we should define types based on how they print. We should define
types based on what they contain. bytea is a perfectly good datatype for
storing binary data, though perhaps we could use a bytea(n) for fixed size
binary data.
However bytea has an inconvenient string representation. Really I would prefer
if bytea were *always* read and written in hex format. We could have a guc to
enable this but it would make it hard to write code which would function
consistently as part of a larger application.
I think this is more akin to the MONEY data type. Really it would be better if
we could declare columns as NUMERIC but attach a "default format" to them for
use when string representation is desired. Similarly with bytea we could
choose a default string representation different from the default in/out
functions.
-- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's RemoteDBA services!