Re: 'text' is gone?

From: Craig Ringer <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au>
To: Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: johnf <jfabiani(at)yolo(dot)com>, pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Adrian Klaver <aklaver(at)comcast(dot)net>
Subject: Re: 'text' is gone?
Date: 2009-02-11 06:46:00
Message-ID: 49927428.6050509@postnewspapers.com.au
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Scott Marlowe wrote:

> So, they did exactly what pgsql crew did with TOAST, but instead of
> sticking it under an existing datatype that everyone already had, they
> made another new type to keep track of. I can't think of a reason to
> not just update the text type to be just like the leader's,
> Postgresql's, but I'm sure they have their reasons. I'd love to hear
> them though.

Their text type was accessed through BLOB interfaces at the
application/SQL level, so just substituting it would break a lot of things.

That said, you'd think they could provide wrappers to allow code used to
using the BLOB interfaces to operate on the new no-longer-a-blob type.

Perhaps there are performance issues there (say, it being more expensive
to repeatedly re-write a tuple with a VARCHAR(MAX) field than to
re-write a TEXT field) that meant they preferred to separate it out.

Whatever the SQL server folks are, they're not stupid, and I can't
imagine they'd do this without at least a half-decent reason.

--
Craig Ringer

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