Re: raw output from copy

2015-07-02 16:02 GMT+02:00 Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>:

>
> On 07/02/2015 09:43 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
>
>> On 2 July 2015 at 14:02, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net <mailto:
>> andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Please don't top-post on the PostgreSQL lists. You've been around
>> here long enough to know that bottom posting is our custom.
>>
>> I posted a patch for this in 2013 at
>> <http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/50F2FA92.9040000@dunslane.net>
>> but it can apply to a SELECT, and doesn't need COPY. Nobody seemed
>> very interested, so I dropped it. Apparently people now want
>> something along these lines, which is good.
>>
>>
>> It's a shame that both solutions are restricted to either COPY or psql.
>>
>> Both of those are working on suggestions from Tom, so there is no history
>> of preference there.
>>
>> Can we have both please, gentlemen?
>>
>> If we implemented Andrew's solution, how would we request it in a COPY
>> statement? Seems like we would want the RAW format keyword anyway.
>>
>>
>>
>
> What's the use case? My original motivation was that I had a function that
> returned a bytea (it was a PDF in fact) that I wanted to be able to write
> to a file. Of course, this is easy enough to do with a client library like
> perl's DBD::Pg, but it seems sad to have to resort to that for something so
> simple.
>
> My original suggestion (<
> http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/4EA1B83B.2050605@pgexperts.com>) was
> to invent a \bcopy command.
>
> I don't have a problem in building in a RAW mode for copy, but we'll still
> need to teach psql how to deal with it.
>

It can be used from psql without any problems.

>
> Another case where it could be useful is JSON - so we can avoid having to
> play tricks like <
> http://adpgtech.blogspot.com/2014/09/importing-json-data.html>. Similar
> considerations probably apply to XML, and the tricks are less guaranteed to
> work.
>
> cheers
>
> andrew
>