On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Michael Paquier
> <michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>>> On 2014-09-18 09:50:38 -0500, Michael Paquier wrote:
>>>> > Do you see the difference between what your doc patch states and the
>>>> > explanation I've given nearby in this thread?
>>>> Perhaps that's the lack of documentation...
>>>
>>> Man. I've explained it to you about three times. The previous attempts
>>> at doing so didn't seem to help. If my explanations don't explain it so
>>> you can understand it adding them to the docs won't change a thing.
>>> That's why I ask whether you see the difference?
>> Urg sorry for the misunderstanding. The patch stated that this
>> parameter only influences the output of the SQL functions while it
>> defines if "the output plugin requires the output method to support
>> binary data"?
>
> I'm not sure exactly what that sentence means.
>
> But here's the point: every series of bytes is a valid bytea, except
> maybe if it's over 1GB and runs afould of MaxAllocSize. But a series
> of bytes is only a valid text datum if it's a valid sequence of
> characters according to the database encoding. We like to think of
> text as being an arbitrary series of bytes, but it isn't. It can't
> contain any \0 bytes, and it can't contain anything that's invalid in
> the database encoding. bytea isn't subject to either of those
> restrictions.
>
> So if we were going to have one universal output format for output
> plugins, it would have to be bytea because that, really, can be
> anything. We could make users convert from that to text or whatever
> they like. But that's unappealing for several reasons: bytea output
> is printed as unreadable hexademical garbage, and encoding conversions
> are expensive. So what we do instead is provide a text output method
> and a binary output method. That way, plugins that want to return
> binary data are free to do so, and output methods that are happy to
> return text can *declare* that what they return is legal text - and
> then we just assume that to be true, and need not do an encoding
> conversion.
Aha, thanks. That's all clear then!
--
Michael