Re: [PATCH] COPY .. COMPRESSED

Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> Attached is a patch to add a 'COMPRESSED' option to COPY which will
> cause COPY to expect a gzip'd file on input and which will output a
> gzip'd file on output. Included is support for backend COPY, psql's
> \copy, regression tests for both, and documentation.

I don't think it's a very good idea to invent such a specialized option,
nor to tie it to gzip, which is widely considered to be old news.

There was discussion (and, I think, a patch in the queue) for allowing
COPY to pipe into or out of an arbitrary shell pipe. Why would that not
be enough to cover this use-case? That is, instead of a hard-wired
capability, people would do something like COPY TO '| gzip >file.gz'.
Or they could use bzip2 or whatever struck their fancy.

regards, tom lane