Re: Wire protocol: type-specific opt-in to binary format

On Nov24, 2011, at 15:04 , Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Florian Pflug:
>> On Nov24, 2011, at 10:03 , Florian Weimer wrote:
>>> I would like to add functionality which allows a client to tell the
>>> server which types can be sent in binary format. The immediate goal is
>>> to suppress hex quoting for BYTEA values, but it seems to make sense to
>>> make this functionality more general.
>>
>> If you use the extended query protocol, the client can already choose
>> text vs. binary representation on a per-column basis. You can query
>> the result's column types by issuing a Describe message after the
>> Parse message. For each column you can then decide whether you want
>> textual or binary representation, and include that choice in the
>> subsequent Bind message.
>
> Interesting. Doesn't this introduce another roundtrip?

Yes. Maybe that's also something that should go on the next protocol version
todo list.

In any case, this is something that solely concerns the client library
(libpq, JDBC, ...), not users of that library, and should thus be handled
on the protocol level, not via a GUC.

best regards,
Florian Pflug