Hi, I've been idly thinking about binary COPY and recent performance efforts spent on it. The main problem I have with binary output is that I never know when it'll be any useful (except very same hardware and PostgreSQL setup)... useful meaning I get to read it back into some database.
Would providing the following two functions help? SELECT * FROM pg_binary_compat(); -> version, timestamp ondisk format, architecture, you name it SELECT pg_binary_compat(version, timestamp ondisk format, ...) -> bool Equiped with this I would first setup a (somewhat portable) virtual machine where I'm sure I'm able to load the binary files, then get to use COPY BINARY everywhere possible: I have a way to easily tell when not to use it. First example would be to teach londiste about this... Now writing the function doesn't sound a lot of fun, but I don't know what to compare to be able to decide whether COPY output will get read correctly on input. It even looks to me like in some cases this would work accross major PostgreSQL versions? Or would that depend on used types, so we'd need a variant taking those into consideration? Anyone interrested in spelling out the checks to get done to implement the functions, or to implementing it, provided there's no obvious reason why it can not be made trustworthy? Regards, -- dim -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
