Re: bytea vs. pg_dump

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> I'm thinking plain old pairs-of-hex-digits might be the best
>> tradeoff if conversion speed is the criterion.

> That's a lot less space-efficient than base64, though.

Well, base64 could give a 33% savings, but it's significantly harder
to encode/decode. Also, since it has a much larger set of valid
data characters, it would be *much* more likely to allow old-style
formatting to be mistaken for new-style. Unless we can think of
a more bulletproof format selection mechanism, that could be
an overriding consideration.

regards, tom lane