Re: bytea vs. pg_dump

Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>
>>> I'm thinking plain old pairs-of-hex-digits might be the best
>>> tradeoff if conversion speed is the criterion.
>>>
>
>
>> That's a lot less space-efficient than base64, though.
>>
>
> Well, base64 could give a 33% savings, but it's significantly harder
> to encode/decode. Also, since it has a much larger set of valid
> data characters, it would be *much* more likely to allow old-style
> formatting to be mistaken for new-style. Unless we can think of
> a more bulletproof format selection mechanism, that could be
> an overriding consideration.
>
>
>

Hex will already provide some space savings over our current encoding
method for most byteas anyway. It's not like we'd be making things less
efficient space-wise. And in compressed archives the space difference is
likely to dissolve to not very much, I suspect.

cheers

andrew