Re: Re: COPY BINARY file format proposal

At 20:40 6/12/00 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>Philip Warner <pjw(at)rhyme(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>> I'd prefer to see a single magic number for all binary COPY output, then a
>> few bytes of header including a version number, and flags to indicate
>> endianness, OIDs etc. It seems a lot cleaner than overloading the magic
>> number.
>
>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? I hope you're not serious...or
if you are, I'd be interested to know why.

>What might we need in the header besides a version indicator and a
>has-OIDs flag?

Just of the top of my head, some things that could be there in the future:

- floating point representation (for portability)

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

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

I really have no idea what might be there, but it seems prudent to do it
this way.

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