bytea performance issue

I have to store binary data in a table, ranging from 512K - 1M. I am getting very poor performance when inserting this data.

create table my_stuff (data bytea);

I then try to insert 10 1M blobs into this table using PQexecParams from C. It takes ~10 seconds to insert the 10 records.

The test is being performed locally so this is not a network issue. If I change the data I send from the client to 1M worth of text, and change the 'my_stuff.data' to TEXT, the same test takes ~2 seconds. Has anyone else seen this performance issue with bytea?

I looked at large objects but that is limited to an Oid and I will need more than 4 billion unique identifiers. Maybe not 4 billion objects at once, but I will burn through them quickly.

I looked at the byteain and byteaout functions in the postgresql source and there is quite a bit of processing going on - escape stuff. Although, this is for text-to-internal correct? If I use PGexecParams setting the format to binary, the backend should use the recv/send functions ... right?

I don't need this escaping; this information never needs to be in text form. Is it possible to create a user-defined type that's only binary? It looks like I am forced to defined an input and output function. The input function takes a CString.

Any other solutions for getting binary data into postgresql? Suggestions?

skye

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