Re: BYTEA / DBD::Pg change in 9.0 beta

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:54:01AM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Stefan Kaltenbrunner
> <stefan(at)kaltenbrunner(dot)cc> wrote:
> > On 05/19/2010 08:13 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Bernd Helmle <mailings(at)oopsware(dot)de> writes:
> >>> --On 18. Mai 2010 23:20:26 +0200 Jesper Krogh <jesper(at)krogh(dot)cc> wrote:
> >>>> May I ask whats the reason is for "breaking" the compatibillity?
> >>
> >>> "Efficency", if i am allowed to call it this way. The new hex
> >>> representation should be more efficient to retrieve and to handle than the
> >>> old one. I think bytea_output was set to hex for testing purposes on the
> >>> first hand, but not sure wether there was a consensus to leave it there
> >>> finally later.
> >>
> >> Yeah, we intentionally set it that way initially to help find stuff that
> >> needs to be updated (as DBD::Pg evidently does). ?It's still TBD whether
> >> 9.0.0 will ship with that default or not.
> >
> > given how much faster the new format is (or rather how slow the old one
> > was) and the number of people I have seen complaining "why is bytea so
> > slow) I would like to see it staying turned on by default. However this
> > also depends on how quickly database driver developers can adapt.
>
> I would favor waiting a release to turn it on by default, precisely to
> give driver developers time to adapt.
>
Changing something like that within the minor release arc is
not a good idea. It would be better to have it on by default and
if the driver developers are not up to use it, they can have that
as a setting that they will need to change when going to 9.0. I
would be very upset to have a minor upgrade break my database. At
least the major upgrades have more testing.

Regards,
Ken