Re: Re: COPY BINARY file format proposal

Philip Warner <pjw(at)rhyme(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>> OK, we can do it that way. I'm still going to pick a magic number that
>> looks different depending on endianness, however ;-).

> What does the smiley mean in this context?

Just thinking that the only way an endianness flag inside the header
would be useful is if we pick a magic number that's a bytewise
palindrome.

> - floating point representation (for portability)

Specified how? (For that matter, determined how?)

> - flag for compressed or uncompressed toast fields (I assume you dump them
> uncompressed?)

Yes, I want COPY to force 'em to uncompressed so as to avoid problems
with cross-version changes of compression algorithm. (Right at the
moment it gets that wrong.)

> - version number may be important if we dump a subset of fields (ie. we'll
> need to store the field names somewhere).

No we don't. ASCII COPY format doesn't store field names either ... at
least not as part of the data stream ... and should not IMHO. Don't you
want to be able to reload into a table that you've changed the column
names of?

regards, tom lane