Re: raw output from copy

On 08/05/2015 04:59 PM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> On 07/27/2015 02:28 PM, Pavel Stehule wrote:
>> 2015-07-27 10:41 GMT+02:00 Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>:
>>
>>> What about input? This is a whole new feature, but it would be nice
>>> to be
>>> able to pass the file contents as a query parameter. Something like:
>>>
>>> \P /tmp/foo binary
>>> INSERT INTO foo VALUES (?);
>>
>> The example of input is strong reason, why don't do it via inserts. Only
>> parsing some special "?" symbol needs lot of new code.
>
> Sorry, I meant $1 in place of the ?. No special parsing needed, psql
> can send the query to the server as is, with the parameters that are
> given by this new mechanism.
>
>> In this case, I don't see any advantage of psql based solution. COPY is
>> standard interface for input/output from/to files, and it should be used
>> there.
>
> I'm not too happy with the COPY approach, although I won't object is
> one of the other committers feel more comfortable with it. However, we
> don't seem to be making progress here, so I'm going to mark this as
> Returned with Feedback. I don't feel good about that either, because I
> don't actually have any great suggestions on how to move this forward.
> Which is a pity because this is a genuine problem for users.
>
>

This is really only a psql problem, IMNSHO. Inserting and extracting
binary data is pretty trivial for most users of client libraries (e.g.
it's a couple of lines of code in a DBD::Pg program), but it's hard in psql.

I do agree that the COPY approach feels more than a little klunky.

cheers

andrew