Reply-To: sender
Hi. I was surprised to discover today that postgres's
character types don't support zero bytes. That is,
Postgres isn't 8-bit clean. Why is that?
More to the point, I need to store about 1k bytes per row
of varying-length 8-bit binary data. I have a few options:
+ BLOBs. PostgreSQL BLOBs make me nervous. I worry about the BLOB not being deleted when the corresponding row in
thetable is deleted. The documentation is vague.
+ What I really need is a binary *short* object type. I have heard rumors of a legendary "bytea" type that might help
me,but it doesn't appear to be documented anywhere, so I hesitate to use it.
+ I can base64-encode the data and store it in a "text" field. But postgres is a great big data-storage system;
surelyit can store binary data without resorting to this kind of hack.
What should I do? Please help. Thanks!
--
Jason Orendorff
P.S. I would love to help improve PostgreSQL's documentation. Whom should I contact?