OIDs in pg_type stable across versions?

From: Eric Marsden <emarsden(at)mail(dot)dotcom(dot)fr>
To: pgsql-interfaces(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: OIDs in pg_type stable across versions?
Date: 1999-01-20 10:16:31
Message-ID: wzi3e56ckqo.fsf@mail.dotcom.fr
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Hello,

I have written a socket-level interface to PostgreSQL for scsh, an
implementation of the Scheme programming language which provides a
POSIX interface. Unlike Tcl or Perl, Scheme distinguishes between
numbers and strings and booleans and so on (it's a real programming
language :), so I'm looking at how it might be possible to convert
data retrieved from the backend as a character stream into the
appropriate Scheme types.

The fe-be protocol seems to provide sufficient information to do this
type coercion: when the backend sends the attribute data in response
to a SELECT statement, it sends a sequence of tuples (name, type-id,
size). The type-id is an OID from the pg_type table.

Is is reasonable to assume that these oids will be stable across
versions and platforms, or will I have to reconstruct a table from
a `SELECT typname, oid FROM pg_type' each time a connection is
initiated?

(or maybe there's some simpler way to do the type coercions?)

--
Eric Marsden
emarsden @ mail.dotcom.fr
It's elephants all the way down

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