Re: [HACKERS] Binary cursors, numerics and other types

Tom Lane wrote:
> It is not libpq's job to try to deal with binary data from the server
> --- for one thing, libpq may be compiled on a different architecture
> with a different representation than the server is (wrong endianness,
> different floating point format, etc). libpq doesn't even have any
> way of finding out whether a conversion is needed, let alone doing it.
>
> In the current scheme of things, binary cursors are of very limited use,
> and you are *really* foolish if you try to use them for anything except
> the most primitive data types like "int4". Your code will break without
> warning whenever Jan feels like changing the internal representation of
> numeric, as I believe he intends to do soon. We have never guaranteed
> that the internal representation of date/time types is frozen, either
> --- Thomas has been heard muttering about replacing timestamp with
> datetime, for example.

Hmm, a real pity. Always thought that it was the responsibility of the
persistant store to provide a heterogenous interface. Oh well back
to messy error prone conversions to and from strings.

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Regards
Theo