copy binary from stdin; Why is it broken?

Hi,

For speed I had a programme (actually a CORBA server) that would
receive a lot of records, copy them into a binary record and copied them
into the database. As this is a CORBA server on the same machine as the
database, there are no endedness problems or anything like that. This
worked just great until the latest update: now I get 'COPY BINARY is not
supported to stdout or from stdin'. In the context of psql there may be
good reasons for this, but from a programme it works well, so why
disallow it? Now I've got to go and convert everything to a load of
printf's, which are then converted back into binary -- seems kind-of
silly. And I'm not comfortable with these types of conversions for
floats at all.

On a separate note: what would be really great for loading large amounts
of data into a database is if one could have a serial field that
updated anyway. Some databases give you the next serial value if you try
to insert null -- which seems reasonable in the context of a SERIAL,
which is NOT NULL. I can see that this may cause problems in the case of
fields that do a default nextval('sequence'), and which consequently can
be null, but the benefits would be large.

Often simulations or sensors (we have both) generate large streams of
binary data and a way of loading this data into the database rapidly is
very, very useful.

Adriaan