On Sun, 20 May 2007, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> This is not data given to store. It's data being exported.
Data being exported has a funny way of turning around and being stored in
the database again. It's kind of nice to know the damage done during that
round trip is minimized.
> Tom seems to think this is not a goal (though, aside from his disbelief
> that such a goal is attainable, I have heard no arguments against it).
If Tom thinks it's not attainable, the best way to convince him otherwise
would be demonstrate that it's not. From here, it looks like your
response to his concerns for the pitfalls he pointed out has been waving
your hands and saying "no, that can't really be a problem" while making it
clear you haven't dug into the details. One reason people use text
formats for cross-platform exchanges is that getting portable binary
compatibility for things like floating point numbers is much harder than
you seem to think it is.
Stepping back for a second, your fundamental argument seem to be based on
the idea that doing conversions to text is such a performance issue in a
driver that it's worth going through these considerable contortions to
avoid it. Given how many other places performance can be throttled along
that path, that itself is a position that requires defending nowadays.
In the typical driver-bound setups I work with, there's plenty of CPU time
to burn for simple data conversion work because either the network wire
speed or the speed of the underlying database I/O are the real
bottlenecks.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD