Re: Binary support for pgoutput plugin

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 07:21, Dave Cramer <davecramer(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 07:18, Petr Jelinek <petr(dot)jelinek(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 05/06/2019 00:08, Andres Freund wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > On 2019-06-05 00:05:02 +0200, David Fetter wrote:
>> >> Would it make sense to work toward a binary format that's not
>> >> architecture-specific? I recall from COPY that our binary format is
>> >> not standardized across, for example, big- and little-endian machines.
>> >
>> > I think you recall wrongly. It's obviously possible that we have bugs
>> > around this, but output/input routines are supposed to handle a
>> > endianess independent format. That usually means that you have to do
>> > endianess conversions, but that doesn't make it non-standardized.
>> >
>>
>> Yeah, there are really 3 formats of data we have, text protocol, binary
>> network protocol and internal on disk format. The internal on disk
>> format will not work across big/little-endian but network binary
>> protocol will.
>>
>> FWIW I don't think the code for binary format was included in original
>> logical replication patch (I really tried to keep it as minimal as
>> possible), but the code and protocol is pretty much ready for adding that.
>>
> Yes, I looked through the public history and could not find it. Thanks for
> confirming.
>
>>
>> That said, pglogical has code which handles this (I guess Andres means
>> that by predecessor of pgoutput) so if you look for example at the
>> write_tuple/read_tuple/decide_datum_transfer in
>>
>> https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/pglogical/blob/REL2_x_STABLE/pglogical_proto_native.c
>> that can help you give some ideas on how to approach this.
>>
>
> Thanks for the tip!
>

Looking at:
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/8255c7a5eeba8f1a38b7a431c04909bde4f5e67d/src/backend/replication/pgoutput/pgoutput.c#L163

this seems completely ignored. What was the intent?

Dave