OO / fe-be protocol

[Forgive me if you got this already. I don't _think_ it got out last
time]..

Casting your minds back again to the discussion a few months ago. I was
talking about making changes to the fe/be protocol to accomodate the OO
extensions I was talking about. At the time I mentioned interest in
fixing some other things while I was there such as adding a streaming
interface, and perhaps fixing a few other things while I was at it.

Then someone said all the code was going to be discarded anyway and the
protocol moved to Corba. That threw a spanner in the works and I havn't
done anything since because I couldn't get any more details.

So here's the question again. Is Corba really a good thing for a
database, seeing as a db is concerned with transferring massive chunks
of
simply formatted data. I'm no Corba guru, but I would have thought (a)
Corba would be not very efficient at that sort of thing, probably adding
big overhead in bytes, and possibly a lot more protocol back and forth,
and (b) isn't the protocol simple enough anyway that Corba is overkill.

If you guys convince me that you really are going to move to Corba that
will influence how I approach this. I might even do work to implement
the Corba stuff.

Chris