Re: Toast, Text, blob bytea Huh?

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001 13:47:01 -0400, you wrote:
>1. I cant get a clear answer on what kind of data type to use for my large
>text string? TEXT, ???, ??? or something about TOAST
>I have seen in the e-mail archive but cant find any documentaion?

TOAST is not a data type, but a project that extended the
capacity of PostgreSQL from version 7.1 onwards to support
fields up to 1 GB in length and rows of (practically) unlimited
length. This makes TEXT and BYTEA good data types for storing
large character and binary data. In the hands of a marketing
department toasted data would be a great feature that justified
the release of version 8 all by itself :-)

However, unlike SQL3 Lobs, values of type TEXT and BYTEA are
always transfered as one unit to the client. As a Java
programmer I like that feature. A string is a string and a byte
array is a byte array, no matter what it's length may be.

Large Objects in PostgreSQL
(http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.1/programmer/largeobjects.html)
support file oriented access to large data. This may be a more
convenient programming model, depending on the client interface
that you use and the requirements of your application.

However, Large Objects in PostgreSQL are objects that exist
independently from the rows in which you hold a reference to
them. If you delete or update a row, your application may need
to delete certain Large Objects as well. In this respect,
PostgreSQL Large Objects differ from SQL3 Lobs.

>2. I've written my own escape method ,("cant find one for Pgsql") , BUT i
>don't know what
>to escape and not to escape. So it keeps failing. I cand find any docs. on
>what to escape either?

I'm not sure what you mean by that. What characters would you
want to escape in what way and why?

And by the way, what client interface are you using?

Regards,
René Pijlman