Re: [HACKERS] Priorities for 6.6

Vince Vielhaber <vev(at)michvhf(dot)com> writes:
> On 04-Jun-99 Tom Lane wrote:
>> However, I am loathe to put *any* work into improving LOs, since I think
>> the right answer is to get rid of the need for the durn things by
>> eliminating the size restrictions on regular tuples.

> Is this doable? I just looked at the list of datatypes and didn't see
> binary as one of them.

bytea ... even if we didn't have one, inventing it would be trivial.
(Although I wonder whether pg_dump copes with arbitrary data in fields
properly ... I think there are still some issues about COPY protocol
not being fully 8-bit-clean...)

As someone else pointed out, you'd still want an equivalent of
lo_read/lo_write, but now it would mean fetch or put N bytes at an
offset of M bytes within the value of field X of tuple Y in some
relation. Otherwise field X is pretty much like any other item in the
database. I suppose it'd only make sense to allow random data to be
fetched/stored in a bytea field --- other datatypes would want to
constrain the data to valid values...

regards, tom lane