On 6/27/13 4:19 AM, Dean Rasheed wrote: > I'd say there are clearly people who want it, and the nature of some > of those answers suggests to me that we ought to have a better answer > in core.
It's not clear what these people wanted this functionality for. They all wanted to analyze a table to compare with another table (or the same table later). Either, they wanted this to detect data changes, in which case the right tool is a checksum, not a cryptographic hash. We already have several checksum implementations in core, so we could expose on of them. Or they wanted this to protect their data from tampering, in which case the right tool is a cryptographic hash, but Noah argues that a sum of MD5 hashes is not cryptographically sound. (And in any case, we don't put cryptographic functionality into the core.) The reason md5_agg is proposed here and in all those cited posts is presumably because the md5() function was already there anyway. The the md5() function is there because the md5 code was already there anyway because of the authentication. Let's not add higher-order already-there-anyway code. ;-) -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
