Re: Binary Cursors, and the COPY command

Thomas Hallgren wrote:
> Oliver Jowett wrote:
> > This is not true if you happen to be using Java on the client side,
> > which has no idea (unless you grot around in the guts of the JVM) what
> > the native byte order is.
> >
> The method java.nio.ByteOrder.nativeOrder() will tell you what the
> native byte order is.

NIO is not present before JDK 1.4. The JDBC driver, at least, needs to
support earlier JVMs.

> > This actually means that Java clients have the
> > opposite problem -- it's a lot of work to try to use the 7.3-style
> > binary formats.
> >
> The commonly used java.io.DataInput will always use network order but
> it's easy enough to read/write little endian using the java.nio and
> java.nio.channel packages.

That's no use if you don't know the endianness of the data you're
receiving (which is what happens under <= 7.3 -- the data followed the
server's byte ordering)

The problem with using native byte orderings is not the byte ordering
itself, but that the order is unpredictable -- at best, you have to
implement code to handle both orders, and at worst you have to just take
a guess and hope you were right..

-O