Re: Porting from Ms srvr2K to PostgreSQL

"Bob Dufour" <dufourr(at)sgiims(dot)com> writes:
> One of the things we do currently is replicate the database content in real
> time accross a WAN connection between two separate sites.

contrib/rserv might handle your needs, although it's still in a fairly
primitive state. (Better replication support is a couple releases away,
I think.)

> It is not possible for us
> to modify the client app. It has to use exactly the same code for now. The
> client app uses Microsoft ADO commands and MS SQL net lib to connect to the
> SQL server. I don't think it's possible to have that client connect to a
> postgress database at the same IP address without changing the client
> code.

I think you're stuck until you can modify that client :-(

> Another thing we do in the current database is embed actual large binary
> data fields in some fields in some of the tables. I did not find a type of
> field that would be able to handle variable length binary data (these fields
> are typically over 2MB in size). Is there a way to handle this in
> PostgreSQL?

In theory you can stuff a couple of meg into a "bytea" field, but it
might be more pleasant to handle this sort of thing as a large object
(a/k/a BLOB). There are LO functions to read and write sections of an
LO, whereas a bytea field could only be stored or retrieved as a unit.
bytea also has some rather ugly quoting conventions that you'd have to
put up with if you use it.

regards, tom lane