> It undoubtedly would make pg_dump smaller, though I'm not sure how much
> that's worth since if you care at all about that you'll gzip it.
>
> But, the other thing it might do is speed up COPY, especially on input. Some
> performance tests of that might be interesting.
For what it is worth:
Ascii85 (aka Base85) is used in PDF by Adobe, with a prefix "<~" and a
suffix "~>". It codes 4 bytes as 5 ascii characters, i.e. a 25% loss.
There is also Z85 which avoids some special characters: backslash, single
quote, double quote.
--
Fabien.