On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>> I'm thinking plain old pairs-of-hex-digits might be the best
>>> tradeoff if conversion speed is the criterion.
>
>> That's a lot less space-efficient than base64, though.
>
> Well, base64 could give a 33% savings, but it's significantly harder
> to encode/decode. Also, since it has a much larger set of valid
> data characters, it would be *much* more likely to allow old-style
> formatting to be mistaken for new-style. Unless we can think of
> a more bulletproof format selection mechanism, that could be
> an overriding consideration.
another nit with base64 is that properly encoded data requires
newlines according to the standard.
merlin