Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: > +1. We don't have to support everything, but things that don't work > should fail on insertion, not retrieval. Otherwise what we have is > less a database and more a data black hole.
That sounds nice as a principle but I'm not sure how workable it really is. Do you want to reject text strings that fit fine in, say, LATIN1 encoding, but might be overlength if some client tries to read them in UTF8 encoding? (bytea would have a comparable problem with escape vs hex representation, for instance.) Should the limit vary depending on how many columns are in the table? Should we account for client-side tuple length restrictions? Anyway, as Alvaro pointed out upthread, we've been down this particular path before and it didn't work out. We need to learn something from that failure and decide how to move forward. regards, tom lane