So, just to throw out a wild idea: If you're talking about making large
changes to the on-the-wire protocol. Have you considered using an existing
database protocol? This would avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time
postgres implements a new feature like prepared queries, bind arrays, or
metadata information.
There is a free implementation of the TDS (Tabular DataStream) protocol used
by Sybase and MSSQL. I don't know how much of it would be interesting for
postgres and how much is Sybase/MSSQL-specific.
It would be pretty neat if postgres could use precisely the same on-the-wire
protocol as other major databases, just requiring a separate high level driver
to interpret the semantic meaning of the data.
At the very least it sounds like interesting to do a compare and contrast as
far as understanding what advantages the features TDS has have and what
disadvantages, before postgres possibly misses good ideas or makes the same
mistakes.
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greg