Re: [HACKERS] Built-in plugin for logical decoding output

No, they don't. 

They can use the SQL interface to logical decoding.

We could enhance that with a few small changes to make it a lot more useful too. Most importantly, allow a long-polling model, where you can wait if there's nothing to consume rather than getting an immediate empty result-set.

I expect the walsender protocol to be dealt with by client drivers, not user applications, much like you never really deal with the regular libpq protocol in your app. PgJDBC and psycopg2 already support it. It'd be nice if libpq offered some helper interfaces for C apps, and I'd help review any such patch.

Nothing against binary output, but as you noted, we can likely use pgoutput for that to some extent at least. I think the pressing need is json, going by the zillion plugins out there for it.