Re: Upcoming events

> Does anyone else have work that they're trying to finish up before
> we go beta?
>

Well, I did have a question that got lost in the details of the recent bytea
discussion. Specifically it was this: is there a good reason that byteaout
octal escapes all non-printable characters?

ISTM that if you are using bytea, it's because you need to store and
manipulate binary data, and therefore it ought to be the client's
responsibility to do any required escaping of the returned results. In the
work I'm doing with bytea presently, I either have to unescape it on the
client side, or use a binary cursor (and some app environments, like PHP,
don't currently give me the option of a binary cursor). Not that big of a
deal, but it doesn't seem right, and as you've seen by recent discussions it
confuses people.

The only reason I can think of for this behavior is that it makes the
results displayable in psql -- but again, I'd expect psql to deal with that,
not the backend.

Thoughts?

-- Joe